Connections to Diani and Malindi, port expansion, industrial park and special economic zone. This is how in a few months Mombasa is set to change its functional appearance and become Africa's most important Indian Ocean hub.
It all passes through the Dongo Kundu area, where the bypass, or the first road junction to skip the city-island and connect through a series of interchanges the Mombasa-Nairobi highway, the Moi International Airport, the SGR railway line, the port, and the road leading to the tourist resort Diani Beach and the Tanzanian border, has already been built.
In reality, Dongo Kundu is much more than a bypass. The zone will include an export logistics center (EPZ), industrial parks, free trade zones (with reduced taxation and facilitation) and other ancillary services such as exhibition hubs, meeting points, conference and exhibition areas. It will also be able to develop residential areas for workers. According to local administrators, thanks to Dongo Kundu's plans, Mombasa will have unprecedented development to become one of the most important ports on the continent.

"Phase one of the industrial park, one of the projects whose detailed designs have been completed," special economic zone development consultant Kiyonori Matsushima told Business Daily, "will include the port, free trade zone, power supply and a water reservoir. Also already under construction are the port access road within the zone and the administrative block. The latter is scheduled for completion within the year."
It was the Japanese who subsidized the entire project, which started with the idea of making the port of Mombasa more modern and efficient and linking it with other onshore services. This was planned with a soft loan of 50 billion Kenyan shillings, payable over 30 years.
In the Ministry of Industrialization's forecasts, the area, which will be fully productive by 2026, is expected to attract enough investment that the investment can be returned long before the set time. The Mombasa port expansion and interconnection project is intended to increase export volumes from Kenya and counter the similar project of Tanzanian neighbors, who are creating the Dar Es Salaam corridor to attract investors and import-export players from landlocked sub-Saharan nations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan.