Not a news feed. Corridor Intelligence covers developments that materially affect our three service lines across MENA and East Africa — port capacity shifts, corridor closures, regulatory changes. Published when something is worth saying, not on a fixed schedule.
Argeen Land Port — Egypt–Sudan Border
Al Gatabat Customs Branch — Sudan
Nearly three years into Sudan's civil war, the country remains functionally divided. The Sudanese Armed Forces hold Khartoum, the central Nile corridor, and the strategic Port Sudan; the Rapid Support Forces control most of Darfur, with active front lines through central Kordofan. Authorities in Khartoum and northern Sudan have restricted the movement of goods toward western states this year, and a border crossing into Chad came under direct attack in December, disrupting one of the region's few remaining humanitarian and commercial lifelines.
For clients with interests along the Cairo–Khartoum–Juba corridor, this is not a temporary disruption to plan around — it is the current operating baseline. We are advising clients to treat any routing through central Sudan as high-friction by default, with realistic timeline and cost assumptions built in from the start, not added after the fact.
Sudan's civil war has made "can we get this through" the first question on every conversation about this corridor, not a footnote. We don't answer that question with a general risk framework. Our presence in the region and a network built over two decades — long before this conflict began — gives us a live, current read on which routes are actually moving, not just which ones are theoretically open.
For clients with Sudan-directed cargo, we are treating this corridor as a standing part of the conversation, with direct, current guidance rather than desk-based risk scoring.
Ethiopia moves more than 95 percent of its trade through a single facility — the Port of Djibouti — at a cost exceeding a billion dollars a year. That dependency has become the center of an escalating dispute with Eritrea over access to the Red Sea, with both governments moving troops toward their shared border through 2026. Egypt has separately signed agreements to expand naval capacity at both Eritrea's Assab port and Djibouti's Doraleh port, adding outside military interest to an already tense standoff.
For clients moving goods through Ethiopia, single-port dependency was already a structural risk before this dispute; the current tension raises the near-term probability that it becomes a disruptive one. We are treating diversification of Ethiopian routing options as a live planning question, not a contingency to revisit later.
Humanitarian access in South Sudan stayed sharply limited through mid-2026, driven by active conflict, bureaucratic and administrative barriers, and continued violence against aid workers and assets. The country is simultaneously absorbing over a million arrivals fleeing the war in Sudan, on top of its own displacement and flooding crises, with roughly two-thirds of the population now requiring humanitarian assistance.
Given these access constraints inside South Sudan itself, Northern Uganda — particularly Kampala and Gulu — has become a standard regional staging point for organizations serving South Sudan, allowing supplies to move forward as border and security conditions allow rather than waiting on conditions inside the country to improve. For clients supporting South Sudan-directed programming, we are recommending exactly this kind of staged, redundant supply positioning rather than a single direct routing plan.
Disruption to the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year pushed Jebel Ali, normally the Middle East's busiest port, to a fraction of its typical throughput, with major carriers rerouting cargo through Fujairah, Khor Fakkan, and Omani ports instead. A June agreement began a gradual reopening of the strait, but the disruption has accelerated a broader Gulf push toward "zero Hormuz" routing — new pipeline and port capacity designed to keep trade moving regardless of the strait's status.
For clients moving goods through the UAE, Jebel Ali's centrality can no longer be assumed by default. We are treating the east-coast alternatives as a standing part of the routing conversation, not a contingency.
AD Ports Group took over a 30-year concession to operate Jordan's Aqaba Multipurpose Port earlier this year — a significant shift in who controls Jordan's sole maritime gateway, a port handling roughly 80 percent of the country's exports and 65 percent of its imports. At the same time, regional security conditions have pushed container shipping costs to Aqaba as high as $6,000, up from a pre-disruption baseline near $1,500, with importers increasingly diverting cargo through Dubai's Jebel Ali and Jeddah instead.
For clients moving goods through Jordan, both the ownership change and the cost volatility matter — the concession terms affect long-term planning, and the routing shifts affect what "normal" transit even means right now. We are tracking both.
Morocco is advancing a multibillion-dollar Atlantic port project at Dakhla, explicitly designed as a gateway connecting landlocked Sahel countries — including Niger — to Atlantic trade routes, bypassing the Mediterranean and Red Sea chokepoints entirely. The initiative has already drawn over a billion dollars in investment and involves coordination across customs authorities and regional business groups.
For clients with interests spanning both Morocco and Niger, this is a long-lead infrastructure story worth watching now, not after it opens — the corridor it creates would meaningfully change the calculus for Sahel-bound freight that currently has no easy route to the coast.
More than two years into the Red Sea security disruption, container and tanker traffic through the Suez Canal remains well below pre-crisis volumes. A handful of major carriers have resumed limited service through the canal in 2026, but the majority of Asia–Europe traffic continues routing around the Cape of Good Hope, adding one to two weeks of transit time and elevated freight and insurance costs.
For clients moving goods through Egypt or the broader MENA corridor, this is not a return to pre-2024 baseline conditions — it is a new operating environment. We are advising clients to treat Cape routing as the standing assumption, with Suez transit as an opportunistic exception rather than a default.
Congestion at the Port of Mombasa, building since mid-2025, has shifted from a temporary bottleneck to a structural condition affecting the Northern Corridor into Uganda and beyond. Truck turnaround times between Mombasa and Kampala are running well above historical norms, and landlocked shippers — including South Sudan — have begun formalizing alternate routing through Tanzanian ports.
For clients dependent on the Mombasa–Kampala corridor, we are recommending built-in schedule buffers and active monitoring of terminal-level performance rather than port-wide averages — congestion is distributing unevenly across Mombasa's own terminals, and the averages obscure that.
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