In November 2023, Houthi forces began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Within weeks, one of the world’s most critical trade corridors — the Suez Canal route carrying roughly 10 to 12 percent of global maritime trade — was effectively disrupted. Shipping lines rerouted.
Transit times stretched by up to two weeks. Freight costs on the Shanghai-Rotterdam corridor doubled. And African ports, almost overnight, were hit with a wave of diverted cargo they had not planned for.
How each port responded told you everything about its digital readiness.
At Mombasa, transshipment traffic surged by nearly 133 percent in 2024 as major shipping lines chose the Kenyan port as a regional hub, feeding smaller feeder vessels to East and Southern Africa.
Container traffic jumped 23.5 percent year-on-year, crossing two million TEUs for the first time.
But that surge came with a cost: without the coordination infrastructure to match the volume, Mombasa slipped 89 places in the World Bank’s 2024 Container Port Performance Index, landing at 375th out of 403 ports globally.
Meanwhile, ports with more fragmented operations — those still relying on phone calls, emails, and siloed agency systems — found themselves overwhelmed, unable to synchronise berth allocation, customs clearance, gate operations, and inland transport in real time.
The result: congestion, delays, and cargo diverted to more agile competitors.
The lesson from the Red Sea crisis, the Strait of Hormuz disruptions, the post-COVID logistics crunch, and every major supply chain shock of the past five years is the same: physical infrastructure matters, but coordination is what determines resilience.
And the ports that coordinate best have one thing in common — a Port Community System.
What a PCS Actually Does
A Port Community System is not a port management tool in the traditional sense.
It is a shared operational layer — a single digital environment that connects every stakeholder in the port ecosystem: shipping lines, terminals, customs agencies, freight forwarders, transport operators, and government authorities.
Instead of each of these parties operating in isolation, exchanging information through fragmented channels, a PCS creates one source of truth.
In practice, this means real-time visibility on vessel arrivals and berth planning, cargo status, documentation readiness, customs and inspection clearance, and gate and inland logistics — all accessible to all relevant parties simultaneously.
When a vessel reschedules, everyone knows instantly. When customs flags a consignment, the terminal and the freight forwarder see it at the same time.
When yard congestion builds, the system alerts before it becomes a bottleneck.
According to Alioune Ciss, Chief Executive Officer of Webb Fontaine, a global port technology company, the shift in how we think about PCS is fundamental.
For years, the value proposition was efficiency: faster turnaround times, fewer documents, lower administrative cost. Today, the critical metric is what Ciss calls ‘readiness’ — the ability to adapt to sudden, unpredictable changes in trade conditions.
“When shipping lanes shift overnight, policies change, and uncertainty increases, the strongest ports are the ones that are the most connected,” he writes.
The World Bank has echoed this view. In a report titled Port Community Systems: Lessons From Global Experience, produced jointly with the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), the Bank described PCS as a competitive advantage for developing countries — reducing paperwork, strengthening supply chain resilience, lowering costs, and enabling smarter risk management at the border.
Africa’s Exposure: A Continent at the Crossroads of Disruption
Africa’s ports sit at the intersection of multiple ongoing trade crises.
The Red Sea conflict redirected significant cargo flows toward the Cape of Good Hope, sending unexpected volumes to South African ports like Durban and Cape Town, which quickly experienced sharp congestion.
Containership arrivals at South African ports increased by as much as 328 percent between December 2023 and early March 2024, according to UNCTAD.
West African hubs including Tema, Abidjan, and Lomé also saw upticks in activity as shippers sought alternatives to traditional corridors.
For East Africa, the picture was more complicated. Deep-water ports like Mombasa and Dar es Salaam absorbed sudden volume spikes but faced structural constraints — not just in physical infrastructure but in coordination capacity.
The contrast between Mombasa, where four-day cargo clearance is achievable, and Dar es Salaam, where delays can stretch to 25 days, illustrates how digital coordination translates directly into market share.
When Dar es Salaam struggled with congestion, cargo from landlocked countries like Burundi, Rwanda, and DRC shifted northward. Burundi’s TEU traffic through Mombasa rose by 320 percent in just the first half of 2024.
| KEY DATA
Mombasa transshipment traffic: +132.9% in 2024 | Mombasa total cargo throughput: +13.9% to 40.9M metric tonnes | Containership arrivals at South African ports: +328% in early 2024 | Red Sea corridor: ~10-12% of global maritime trade disrupted | Dar es Salaam average clearance: up to 25 days | Mombasa average clearance: as low as 4 days |
The African Development Bank recognised the urgency of this challenge when it convened a multi-stakeholder workshop in Abidjan in July 2024 to implement the African Ports Connectivity Portal Project — an initiative designed to improve data collection and digital connectivity among the continent’s ports. Port authorities from ten African countries attended.
The message from that gathering was clear: Africa’s port infrastructure must be both physically larger and digitally smarter to absorb the unpredictability that now defines global trade.
Mombasa Makes Its Move
In October 2025, DP World launched the rollout of a full Port Community System at the Port of Mombasa, developed in partnership with EMEA Port Logistics and implemented alongside the Kenya Ports Authority and the Government of Kenya.
The system gives importers, exporters, freight forwarders, transport companies, and customs agents a single platform for cargo tracking, gate booking, billing, payments, and real-time status updates.
Once fully operational, the system is projected to cut cargo clearance times by up to 30 percent, improving turnaround for more than 3,000 port users annually.
For KPA, the PCS will enable smarter gate operations, tighter control of cargo movements, and reduced dwell times — capabilities that are critical as Mombasa positions itself to handle the region’s growing demand for reliable, fast transit.
Mahmood Albastaki, Chief Operating Officer of Digital Trade Solutions at DP World, was direct in his assessment:
“Digitisation is no longer optional — it is essential for unlocking the full potential of African trade. By introducing this platform in Kenya, we are connecting Africa’s ports to the digital economy and setting a new regional benchmark for digital integration and transparency.”
The Mombasa deployment is part of a broader continental movement.
From West Africa’s established hubs at Tema and Abidjan to South Africa’s Durban — which handled 2.65 million TEUs in 2024 — ports across the continent are investing in terminal operating systems, digital customs platforms, and integrated logistics coordination tools.
The competitive pressure is real: only four African ports appeared in Lloyd’s List’s 2025 global top 100 container rankings.
Even Durban, processing 4.5 million TEUs, fell out of the list due to congestion, vessel delays, and weak rail connectivity.
The Four Functions That Matter When a Crisis Hits
When Ciss of Webb Fontaine outlines what a crisis-ready PCS must deliver, he identifies four capabilities that move beyond traditional efficiency arguments. They are worth examining through an African lens.
Real-time visibility. When vessels reroute or schedules collapse, fragmented communication becomes a liability.
A PCS provides a shared, trusted data environment across berth planning, cargo documentation, customs readiness, and gate operations.
In the chaos of the Red Sea disruptions, ports with this capability could rapidly assess what was arriving, when, and from where — and allocate resources accordingly.
Faster decision-making under pressure. Sudden cargo surges create cascading stress: yard congestion, inspection bottlenecks, inland transport delays.
Without digital coordination, responses are reactive. With a PCS, ports can dynamically reprioritise cargo flows, adjust workflows, and redirect resources before problems compound.
Customs and border continuity. Cargo cannot move if border agencies cannot move. The World Customs Organization and IAPH have both highlighted the importance of interoperability between customs systems and PCS for coordinated border management.
When governments need to introduce new controls or emergency procedures quickly — as many did during the Red Sea crisis — a connected system allows them to do so without grinding trade to a halt.
Transparency as a trust mechanism. Importers and exporters can absorb disruption better than uncertainty.
A PCS gives them visibility into cargo status and anticipated delays, allowing planning and reducing the kind of panic-driven inefficiencies that compound supply chain shocks.
For Africa’s landlocked economies in particular — whose supply chains run through a handful of port gateways — this transparency is not a luxury. It is a lifeline.
“For years, ‘efficiency’ was key when it comes to PCS. Today, the key is ‘resilience.’ When shipping lanes shift overnight, the strongest ports are the ones that are the most connected.” — Alioune Ciss, CEO, Webb Fontaine
The Next Generation: PCS as Intelligence Platform
The PCS conversation has evolved. First-generation systems were primarily about digitising paperwork. Second-generation systems connected stakeholders.
The emerging third generation is moving toward something more sophisticated: predictive analytics, AI-enabled decision-making, and proactive risk management.
This means systems that do not just report what is happening but anticipate what is about to happen — flagging congestion before it builds, simulating operational scenarios before a decision is made, and dynamically optimising berth and yard allocation in real time.
For African ports competing for cargo at a continental level, this is where the competitive frontier now sits.
The African port sector’s growth story is extraordinary by any measure. Total cargo throughput at Mombasa alone grew 14.1 percent in 2024, reaching 41.1 million metric tonnes. Abidjan handled 46.6 million tonnes and 1.6 million TEUs in 2025. Tema and Lomé each processed well over 1.9 million TEUs. The continent’s trade is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the world.
But growth without coordination infrastructure is a vulnerability, not a strength.
The ports that turned the Red Sea crisis into a commercial opportunity — absorbing diverted cargo, expanding their transshipment roles, deepening relationships with shipping lines — were not necessarily the biggest or the most modern in physical terms.
They were the most connected. They had systems in place that let them move faster than the disruption.
What African Ports Cannot Afford to Get Wrong
The geopolitical environment is not getting calmer. The Red Sea crisis is one data point in a structural pattern: trade disruptions are becoming more frequent, more severe, and less predictable. P
anama Canal water levels, Strait of Hormuz tensions, labour actions at major ports, and cyber threats to port IT systems all represent recurring risks that can materialise with little warning.
For African ports — serving not just their own national economies but entire landlocked hinterlands stretching hundreds of kilometres inland — the stakes are particularly high. Uganda depends on Mombasa for 65.7 percent of its transit cargo.
Landlocked Sahel nations rely on Abidjan, Tema, and Lomé. When these gateways struggle to adapt, the consequences ripple across entire economies.
A Port Community System does not prevent disruptions. What it does is ensure that when disruption comes — and it will — a port has the operational intelligence to absorb the shock, reconfigure its workflows, and keep cargo moving. That is the definition of competitive resilience.
The ports that adapt fastest in the next crisis will be the ones investing now. Not just in deeper berths and bigger cranes. In the digital connective tissue that ties the whole ecosystem together.
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