Importing goods to East Africa via Kenya’s Mombasa port is now twice as  cheap as using the alternative Dar es Salaam port in Tanzania, according to report by the Shipping Council of Eastern Africa.

The 2015 East Africa Logistics Performance Survey released last week showed that the cost of transporting a ton of goods through the Northern Corridor, that runs from Mombasa to Kampala in Kenya, has reduced to $2,500 from $3,400 over the last five years.

The cost of using the Central Corridor from Dar es Salaam to Kampala nearly doubled over the same period, to $4,500 in 2015 from $2,507 in 2011.

This makes the Central Corridor twice expensive compared to the Northern one.

Gilbert Lagat, chief executive at Kenya Shippers Council, told a press briefing during the launch of the report in Nairobi that efforts by regional president, Kenya’s Uhuru Keyatta, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, to make the port of Mombasa and the Northern Corridor more efficient had helped reduce the cost.

” … with President Uhuru Kenyatta and his counterparts Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda focused on improving business at the port of Mombasa and the Northern Corridor, the cost of cargo clearance dropped,” Business Daily quotes Lagat saying.

Under the flagship projects under the Northern Corridor Integration Projects (NCIP), the three regional presidents have committed to speed up construction and upgrading of the infrastructure connected the their countries, including the Standard gauge railway and the Mombasa port.

Cargo clearance time at the Mombasa port has dropped from eight days  in 2011 to four in 2015, while it takes up to nine days to clear goods at the Dar es Salaam port.

The report says, the Dar port has an average dwell time, which means the average time a vessel needs to stay in a port, of nine days compared with its northern rival which has a five days dwell time. The global cargo dwell time benchmark is three days.

Tanzania and Kenya are locked in a port construction competition as they aim to become the main transport hub for the region, connecting other landlocked countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan to their port.

While Tanzania is constructing a new port in Bagamoyo, at an estimated cost of $11 billion, that will have the capacity to handle 20 million containers per year, compared with Dar es Salaam’s installed capacity of 500,000, Kenya is constructing a bigger port in Lamu under the $26 billion Lamu Port-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia (LAPSSET) transport corridor project.