Study Of A Hub Port Selection For ECOWAS Zone

ECOWAS(Economic Community of West African States)is the most dynamic area of the African continent.Home to the most populated and the first economy of Africa,it shows a dynamic economic growth that is encouraging foreign investors to invest in its port activities,port being one of the key of the regional growth.In a couple of years,many West African ports,that have been since the end of the colonial time in the area very underdeveloped,suddenly,with the capital invested by private terminal operator became very dynamic with a very developed and modern infrastructure.Those modern ports are attracting many linear shipping companies and the cargo through put in the area is rising at a great speed.Unfortunately,this fast growth in the cargo throughput is bringing many new problems,such as how to handle this fast growing amount of cargo,many ports being lacking adequate capacity to absorb all the flow of the arriving containers.On the other end,few linear shipping companies such as MSC decided to create regional hubs in West Africa.Doing so they are concentrating cargo in some selected ports,therefore reducing the amount of infrastructure required to provide their services and also drag away some cargo from other ports aggravating the inter intra completion within the ports and between the port for cargo and services.This particular point raise the necessity of developing a specific hub or regional hub for the entire ECOWAS region.Doing so will prevent the unhealthy competition between the ports whose geography and location of today is based on the remaining of the colonial era and that is not suitable any longer for today African realities,West African needs and West African growth.Therefore all the concerned ports will benefit of substantial cargo from feeder ships and the services provided by linear shipping companies will therefore be of a higher quality.Creating a regional hub for the ECOWAS zone will reduce the cost of the services,increase the quality,and reduce the cost needed to invest in the ports infrastructure,equipment,in ships and also the ship lean time in the port.The ports with low cargo capacity will avoid congestion and delay in the services as the hub will absorb the overcapacity.To find the most suitable candidate to become a regional hub,10 ports have been preselected base on many variables that have been selected from existing literature on the topic such as the port infrastructure,the intermodal connections and the port throughput to mention a few.Those variables will therefore undergo a simulation performed with DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis)to find the most suitable candidates.Another round of selection will be perform using this time a PESTEL(P for Political,E for Economic,S for Social,T for Technological,L for Legal and E for Environmental)analysis to find out the most suitable candidate.