Angola's crossroads: Can the Lobito Corridor deliver prosperity without sacrificing public health?

IOL News

3 days ago

Bayethe Msimang With Angola, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo rich in natural resources, the corridor offers a vital gateway for mineral exports, crucially improving access to international markets, writes Bayethe Msimang
Image: IOL
The Lobito Corridor, a transformative transnational infrastructure project, is taking shape along the Atlantic coast of Angola. This ambitious initiative, connecting Angola to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is more than just a blueprint. It is a testament to Africa's determination for regional integration, mineral mobility, and economic transformation. The potential benefits of this corridor, such as increased trade and economic growth, cannot be overlooked.
Yet, as the corridor advances through Angola's heartland, slicing across five of its most impoverished provinces, the promise of prosperity faces an uncomfortable truth: development without safeguards can deepen inequality, unravel communities, and cost lives.
Touted as a flagship initiative by the African Development Bank (AfDB) in its 2025 Annual Development Effectiveness Review, the Lobito Corridor is positioned as a logistical artery for the continent—a route to reroute exports, attract investment, and reduce the time it takes to move copper and cobalt from the mineral-rich interiors to global markets. With more than $1.6 billion in investment from the United States, and the European Union, it embodies the modern gospel of infrastructure-led growth.
But in Angola's Benguela, Bié, Huambo, Moxico, and Moxico Leste provinces, where the railway snakes through dense forests and forgotten villages, the lived reality is starkly different.
In many of these provinces, health services are either overstretched or virtually absent. The World Health Organization has flagged that fewer than 40% of births in some areas are attended by trained professionals. Infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis remain widespread, while testing and treatment rates are abysmally low. Hospitals are underequipped, understaffed, and, in some cases, nonexistent. Some areas have fewer than one hospital bed per 10,000 people.
In such a context, the corridor's surge in migration, construction, and commercial activity threatens to tip an already strained health system into full collapse.
According to a detailed risk analysis by the WHO and public health researchers, five primary dangers accompany the corridor's growth: overburdened health infrastructure, disease transmission, environmental degradation, social displacement, and a rise in transport-related injuries. One could easily add a sixth: the unequal distribution of benefits. While foreign investors and national elites reap profits, local communities bear the brunt of pollution, land dispossession, and exploitative labor.
The corridor, in short, risks becoming a steel-framed paradox: a route to riches that bypasses the poor.
Yet this outcome is not preordained. Angolan and its partners have an opportunity to turn the Lobito Corridor into a beacon of sustainable and inclusive development. To do that, infrastructure must be planned with health, not merely freight, in mind.
This corridor is not just about goods moving from east to west, is the sentiment of public health workers in Luanda. It's also about people about girls walking to school, about mothers giving birth, about workers breathing clean air. If those stories are missing from the planning tables, we're building a corridor of exploitation.
Already, warning signs are emerging. Along the Moxico route, air and water pollution from unregulated mining runoff has begun seeping into rivers used by local farmers and families. Temporary settlements mushrooming around construction zones have brought a spike in gender-based violence and child exploitation, mirroring patterns seen in other "boomtown" corridors across the continent. Meanwhile, traffic accidents—particularly involving heavy trucks and makeshift crossings—are on the rise, overwhelming rudimentary emergency services.
The African Development Bank's report acknowledges some of these challenges and calls for greater cross-sector collaboration between ministries of transport, health, environment, and gender. It also advocates for social investment safeguards : such as funding mobile clinics, gender-sensitive policing, and environmental health monitoring as conditions tied to infrastructure finance.
But Angola's record on multisectoral implementation remains patchy at best. For meaningful reform, the country must embrace a model of co-development, where health ministries are not afterthoughts but co-architects. Development finance institutions must do more than approve grants. They must demand health equity metrics in every contract.
This is especially urgent as Angola's oil-dependent economy diversifies. President João Lourenço has rightly staked the country's future on logistics, agriculture, and renewable energy. But none of this will succeed if Angola becomes a cautionary tale of extractive development, where resources flow outward, and trauma flows inward.
In this context, the Lobito Corridor becomes more than a rail or road, it becomes a moral test. Can Africa's new development corridors embody Ubuntu the idea that humanity is shared, and none should progress at the cost of another? Or will they follow the path of so many megaprojects, where roads to riches become pipelines of displacement and disease?
The time to make the right choice is now, as the health risks are well-documented and the development tools are available. The political will to ensure that every brick laid is linked to a life saved is not just crucial, it's urgent. We cannot afford to delay in addressing these issues.
While the health risks are well-documented and the development tools are available, what's crucial now is the political will to ensure that every brick laid is linked to a life saved.
In practical terms, this means embedding public health impact assessments into every stage of the corridor's expansion. It means mandating that contractors, foreign and domestic, to invest in local clinics, clean water infrastructure, and occupational health. It means that maternal wards must rise alongside warehouses, and that women's voices must be heard when permits are issued.
If managed correctly, the Lobito Corridor could become a global model for development, blending economic progress with social well-being. This potential for positive change should not just inspire hope and optimism, but also motivate us all to work towards it.