Brazzaville–Kinshasa Bridge

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The Brazzaville–Kinshasa Bridge is a proposed road-rail bridge construction project over the Congo River. It would connect the Republic of the Congo with the Democratic Republic of the Congo at their respective capitals, Brazzaville and Kinshasa. In February 2026, officials from the two countries validated a bilateral agreement establishing a harmonized tax and customs regime for the project and said that this would allow the request-for-proposals process to be relaunched. The cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, capitals of the Republic of the Congo (ROC) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) respectively, are situated on opposite banks of the Congo River. They are the closest national capitals on Earth (excluding the Vatican, located in Rome, since the city-state has no capital). Plans for a bridge crossing the Congo River to connect the two countries were financed in 1991 but shelved in 1993 due to a lack of sufficient funding and turmoil in the ROC. The project was revived a decade later in 2003 by the ROC's Transport Infrastructure Unit (Cellule d’infrastructures de transport), which had previously cooperated with the European Union on similar projects in Central Africa. The proposed bridge was relocated downstream to take advantage of the narrower and rocky riverbed which would facilitate easier erection of bridge piers. The cost of construction was estimated to be between 40 million and 80 million euros in 2003. In January 2004, the project was endorsed by the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), which by then was estimated to cost 403 million euros. The project stalled in 2005 when DRC presidential chief of staff Léonard She Okitundu expressed that the project would adversely affect economic activity in its port towns of Boma and Matadi, which are key contributors to its economy. The DRC refused to endorse the bridge project without a commitment by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) to finance a deepwater port in Banana, its only city on the Atlantic coast. Okitundu also confirmed that sanctions by the African Union meant the DRC had been excluded from negotiations with NEPAD regarding the proj

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