Tanzania's Dar es Salaam Cuts Vessel Time as Africa's Inland Corridors Take the Strain
Vessel time in port is the figure shipping lines see. Cargo still stuck on a road, a railway or a border crossing does not enter that measure. African ports are now judged mainly by how long a container ship spends in port, not by the cost of reaching a mine, a factory or a market inland. The World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence Container Port Performance Index for 2025 ranks about 400 ports on the time between arrival at anchorage and departure from the berth. Tanger Med in Morocco ranked sixth globally, Port Said in Egypt 15th and Djibouti 53rd. Dar es Salaam rose to 255th, from 360th in the previous ranking. Mombasa fell to 396th, from 375th. Lamu entered the index at 345th.
Vessel Time Is the Measure That Travels
The World Bank gave Dar es Salaam a CPPI 2025 score of -7.75. Its standardised score stood at -176 in 2021. The index takes account of vessel size and the volume of cargo handled. It does not measure customs, road, rail or border time.
Jasper A. Kwayu, communications consultant for Dar es Salaam Port, wrote that CPPI "measures how efficiently container ships move through ports, taking account of vessel size and the amount of cargo handled. It does not measure the full cost of moving goods through customs, roads, railways or borders, but provides a comparable measure of performance at the maritime gateway." The port, he wrote, is handling ships faster while processing record cargo volumes, strengthening Tanzania's role as an Indian Ocean gateway for trade extending into Central, Eastern and Southern Africa.
The gain at the quay is also documented by the operator. DP World reported in July 2026 that discharge time for comparable cargo at Dar es Salaam had fallen by more than 90%, from over 300 hours to less than 28 hours, since operations began in April 2024. Tanzania Ports Authority said average handling time for container vessels had fallen to about three days.
Volume Is Outrunning the Quay
Volume rose at the same time. The authority said Dar es Salaam handled a record 33.7 million tonnes in the 2025/26 financial year, compared with 27.7 million tonnes a year earlier and 23.7 million tonnes in 2023/24. A growing share is not for the domestic market. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounted for 5.995 million tonnes in 2024/25, representing 47% of transit traffic handled for neighbouring countries. Zambia followed with 3.51 million tonnes, Rwanda with 1.72 million tonnes, Malawi with 675,200 tonnes and Burundi with 425,774 tonnes. On a marketing mission in Lubumbashi, the authority said cargo from the DRC increased 43%, from 4.1 million tonnes in 2023/24 to 5.9 million tonnes in 2024/25.
Kwayu wrote that those figures place Dar es Salaam "at the maritime end of supply chains stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes and the Central African Copperbelt."
Copper, cobalt, agricultural commodities, machinery, fuel and manufactured goods move through corridors linking the port with major African production and consumer markets.
Work under the Dar es Salaam Maritime Gateway Project reconstructed and deepened berths, widened and deepened the entrance channel and expanded the turning basin. DP World and Tanzania East Africa Gateway Terminal Limited have invested in cargo-handling equipment, yards, information systems and other infrastructure intended to increase the freight that can be processed through the port.
The Corridor Starts After the Berth
Landlocked economies measure a corridor by the time and cost of moving cargo from the coast to a factory, a mine, a farm or a market, hundreds or thousands of kilometres inland. Kwayu wrote: "Landlocked African economies ultimately measure a trade corridor by the time and cost required to move cargo from the coast to factories, mines, farms and consumer markets hundreds or thousands of kilometres inland."
Tanzania is investing beyond the waterfront, including in railways, dry ports and freight facilities designed to move rising volumes away from Dar es Salaam and towards neighbouring markets. "Faster vessel turnaround can increase port capacity and improve shipping reliability, but gains at the quay can be reduced if cargo encounters delays on railways, roads or border crossings," Kwayu wrote. As countries invest in competing routes to the Indian and Atlantic oceans, the ports that gain regional cargo will be those able to connect improvements at sea with reliable movement inland.
Dar es Salaam's latest numbers show progress on the maritime part of that equation. The next test, Kwayu wrote, is whether Tanzania can maintain shorter vessel times while carrying record volumes deeper into a regional market that increasingly extends from the Indian Ocean to the Copperbelt and the Great Lakes.
The same limit is already on the record in earlier coverage. In The Supply Chainer's 3 September piece on port congestion, Scarlett Suarez, senior intelligence analyst at Dryad Global, said the monitoring focus "shifts from simply tracking whether a route is open or closed to analyzing the entire end-to-end friction." Teams still need visibility on chokepoints, she said, but "real-time or near-real-time intelligence on port and terminal conditions across origin, transshipment, and destination hubs is crucial. This involves tracking waiting times, berth availability, delays due to labor or weather, and capacity constraints in downstream trucking and rail transport."
A better CPPI score does not settle that question for Dar es Salaam. The index stops when the ship leaves the berth. The DRC, Zambia and Rwanda cargo that now dominates the transit book starts its real clock after discharge, on a railway, a road or a border that the ranking does not measure. Shorter vessel time can raise the volume hitting those links. If they do not move at the same pace, the hours taken off the quay return as dwell inland, and the shipper still measures the corridor from the coast to the Copperbelt, not from anchorage to berth.
