Mobility: Developing Countries Through the Lens of Megaprojects, Equity, Sustainability, and Development

Mobility and transport investment in developing countries face different challenges from those of developed economies. A viable and balanced recipe for them should skip a Euro-centric approach and focus on local conditions. In particular, the role of megaproject must be questioned, as they are often risky and out-of-scale, fitted for extraction and industrial sectors that typically are aliens to local economy and development. In this chapter I propose a reflection on lighter solutions for mobility problems in Africa, focusing in particular on habilitating conditions: a reliable and diffused road and air accessibility, maintenance, the support to investments in vehicles, feasible solutions to traffic in cities. In the second part, I focus on two very different cases of transport megaprojects in Mozambique: the Maputo Corridor and the Maputo-Catembe bridge; pointing out that the first is a successful case because solving a real missing link and part of an industrial strategy, while the second is a perfect white elephant.