The Central African Copperbelt holds one of the world's densest concentrations of copper and cobalt, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone mines roughly 72% of the world's cobalt. The Copperbelt is landlocked, and for decades its ore has left the continent mostly by heading east and south, toward ports like Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean. The Lobito Corridor is a bet that it can go the other way.
The corridor's spine is the Benguela Railway: a roughly 1,300-kilometer line from the Atlantic port of Lobito, in Angola, running east to Luau on the DRC border and on toward the mines around Kolwezi. A consortium of Trafigura, Mota-Engil and Vecturis operates it under a 30-year concession Angola awarded in 2022, taking the line over in 2024.
The financing agreements were signed in December 2025 and reached financial close on July 31st 2026 at $786 million, of which $553 million comes from the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and $200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa. The money is meant to lift the port's mineral-handling capacity roughly tenfold, to 4.6 million tons a year, and cut the cost of moving critical minerals by up to 30%. Washington frames the investment as "securing critical minerals for mutual U.S.–Africa benefit."
A second, harder project would extend the corridor with roughly 830 kilometers of new track, across Angola from Luacano to the Zambian border at Jimbe, then through Zambia to the Copperbelt town of Chingola. It is further off: the line is still out to engineering and construction bidding. Groundbreaking is expected to begin in late 2026 or early 2027 and its own financing is not due to close until 2027.
Running the other way is TAZARA, the 1,860-kilometer railway China built in the 1970s to give Zambian copper an outlet at Dar es Salaam, bypassing white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. In late 2025 China signed a roughly $1.4 billion deal to modernize it. The result is a map on which the same landlocked ore can now be pulled toward either coast: west to the Atlantic on a U.S.- and EU-backed line, or east to the Indian Ocean on a Chinese-backed one, turning a single mineral belt into a contest between two oceans and two blocs.
The map shows both pulls: the gold line is the Lobito Corridor and its planned Zambian extension; the blue line is TAZARA to Dar es Salaam. Toggle the layers to isolate the mining hubs or either ocean's port.