After nine years of striving, the government of Uganda yesterday signed a contract with Turkish contractor Yapı Merkezi to build the first section of the country’s standard gauge railway, New Vision website reports.

The €2.7bn deal was formalised in the capital Kampala by Bageya Waiswa, the permanent secretary for public works, and Erdem Arıoğlu, the vice chair of Yapı Merkezi.

Work will begin in November and is expected to take 48 months to complete.

The 272km section will be part of a 1,700km electrified system that will link with other Great Lake states and the Kenyan standard gauge railway that terminates in the port of Mombasa.

This section will run from Kampala to Malaba at the border with Kenya.

The network is expected to boost economic growth throughout the East African region.

Waiswa said Uganda would use its own funds and loans from the UK’s Standard Chartered bank, backed by export credit guarantees, to finance the project.

The deal follows a number of false starts.

As far back as 2015, Uganda entered into an agreement with China Harbour, a subsidiary of China Communications, to implement the project, on the condition that Chinese capital would be made available to pay for the work.

The reluctance of China’s Export–Import Bank to finance the scheme led Uganda last year to abandon the contract, clearing the way for the Turkish deal.

Yapı Merkezi has experience of both the work and the conditions, as it is helping to build Tanzania’s 1,219km standard gauge line linking Dar es Salaam with the Great Lake states of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, eventually, Angola and the Atlantic Ocean.

Turkey’s soft power in the continent has been growing rapidly in recent times.

Its trade volume with Africa has increased from $5.4bn to nearly $41bn over the past 20 years, and it has launched cultural programmes, business councils and an extensive flight network across the continent, with Turkish Airlines now flying to some 60 African destinations.