The ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID) has approved $100 million in funding for a 47.7-kilometre stretch of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway in Nigeria.
This investment in Section One, Phase One of the 700-kilometre highway, announced in mid-2025, carries implications well beyond the borders of Nigeria.
The funding gains strategic significance when viewed alongside the $15.6 billion Abidjan-Lagos Corridor, which is set to begin construction early this year.
Together, these projects could create an integrated coastal transport system stretching from Côte d’Ivoire through Ghana, Togo, Benin and deep into Nigeria’s eastern seaboard.
The Lagos-Calabar route opens the Nigerian heartland to West African-originating goods while offering reciprocal connectivity, linking Nigerian products and traders more directly with coastal West African markets.
Construction began in March 2024, with the highway designed to connect nine Nigerian states and improve access to seaports and agro-industrial zones along the southern economic corridor.
Building work on the first section of the highway, running from Victoria Island to Eleko Village in Lagos State, is reported to be over 70 per cent complete.
Questions of co-ordination
A word of caution, because we’ve seen this pattern before: physical roads need soft infrastructure to deliver on their promise.
A decade of advocacy work by Borderless Alliance has shown consistently that hard infrastructure investments deliver their full potential only when paired with complementary soft infrastructure: harmonised customs procedures, digital trade documentation systems, co-ordinated border management and simplified transit protocols.
The EBID investment creates both an opportunity and a test. Reports say additional funding has been secured from Germany (through Deutsche Bank) and the United Arab Emirates. The critical questions are whether Nigeria and ECOWAS institutions will use this highway construction phase to advance trade facilitation reforms which will ensure that trucks actually move faster, whether customs digitalisation will keep pace with road construction, and whether the regional value chain development mentioned in the funding rationale will receive the institutional support required to benefit coastal communities.
With total commitments by EBID in West Africa now exceeding $5 billion, the bank has demonstrated capacity for corridor-scale financing. Now we need to see this financing philosophy extend beyond physical infrastructure to include the institutional reforms that turn roads into regional commerce.
At Borderless Alliance, we applaud the project and look forward to seeing how customs harmonisation and digital trade facilitation measures develop alongside the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor construction and Nigeria’s coastal highway ambitions. These accompanying reforms will ultimately determine the regional integration impact of these investments.
Ziad Hamoui is the national chairman in Ghana of the regional trade advocacy group Borderless Alliance. This is an updated version of an article first published on the author’s LinkedIn page
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