Evaluating sustainable dry port expansion in Africa

Abstract

Ports are the most important nodes in the supply chain of cargo and improving their sustainability will positively affect the sector as a whole. This improvement can be achieved by incorporating stakeholders in the process of port development. Social, environmental and economic development achieved together are defined as sustainable development.
In the prospect of sustainable port development, Ethiopia is an interesting country to study because of its rapid and relatively stable economic growth since 2005 and its low logistics performance. This study is built around a dry port expansion project in Ethiopia, for which a 150 million USD loan from the World Bank recently became available. Modjo Dry Port (MDP) is located close to the capital of Ethiopia and its largest production and consumption areas. Before acting directly, the sustainability of the alternatives according to different stakeholders, should be considered. Incorporating sustainable development in the project in general is a significant challenge. This leads to the formulation of a research question. How to evaluate strategic alternatives for sustainable expansion of Modjo Dry Port? This study describes a method on how to develop a number of distinct alternatives, and proposes a framework for the evaluation of sustainable dry port expansion. Such an evaluation tool for the dry port site specifically, does not yet exist. The framework is tested for MDP in Ethiopia.
For the development of the alternatives of MDP, two overarching themes at the dry port were identified: operations are inefficient with dwell time of 50 to 60 days on average, and no diversification of cargo. Based on these themes three alternatives for MDP are defined. For the sustainable evaluation of Modjo Dry Port the Multi-Criteria-Multi-Actor analysis (MAMCA) is used because it explicitly incorporates stakeholder incentives in a more traditional multi-decision criteria analysis (MCDA). The MAMCA consists of seven steps.
Step 1 and 2: Four stakeholder groups for MDP are defined: internal, community, public policy makers and private companies. For the 3rd and 4th step, a framework for evaluation is constructed, based on literature and stakeholders’ input. The criteria are categorised based on the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental and economic development. In step 5 the weights for the criteria of the evaluation framework are determined by stakeholders. In the last steps of the MAMCA the proposed alternatives were scored against the current layout of MDP for all criteria in the evaluation framework. The final output is a multi-actor view on scoring the alternatives.
Dry ports closer to Addis Ababa are a suitable alternative for MDP. Stakeholder participation is an important part of the study, however, it proved difficult to integrate a sufficient number of stakeholder responses in the analysis.
For MDP specifically, stakeholder groups showed similar interest, and the preference for different alternatives is equal amongst the groups. Analysis shows that the alternatives improving operation efficiency score markedly higher on sustainability.