Chinese Consortium Begins Work on 264km Kenyan SGR Extension to Kisumu

Construction has begun on the next phase of Kenya's standard gauge railway (SGR), extending the line 264km from Suswa, west of Nairobi, to the Lake Victoria port city of Kisumu. The contract for Phase 2B was awarded to a consortium of state-owned China Communications Construction Co and China Road & Bridge Corp, the same firms that built the earlier Mombasa-Nairobi and Nairobi-Suswa sections.

The new section includes an 8.9km branch line serving the port of Kisumu, intended to boost freight traffic on Lake Victoria and improve regional trade links with Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A further stage, Phase 2C, is planned to continue the line from Kisumu to Malaba on the Ugandan border, completing a route originally envisioned to connect Mombasa with Kampala.

The Kisumu extension has faced repeated delays and funding uncertainty in recent years, with Kenyan officials citing difficulty securing Chinese financing for the wider Naivasha-Kisumu-Malaba corridor, with Railway Gazette pricing the Suswa-Kisumu (Phase 2B) contract itself at roughly KSh700bn (about $5.4bn), though other reports frame that figure as covering the combined cost of the remaining Kisumu and Malaba sections together. President William Ruto's government has pushed to restart the stalled project this year, framing it as central to Kenya's regional trade ambitions and its role as an East African transport hub.