Ethiopia has begun construction on a $12.5 billion airport its government says will become the largest in Africa, breaking ground on the project in the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, according to a report by Guardian Nigeria. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the hub, which is expected to eventually handle around 110 million passengers a year once fully built out, dwarfing the roughly 25 million annual capacity of the capital's existing Bole Airport, which the new facility is meant to replace.
The project includes a multi-lane motorway linking the new airport to Addis Ababa and a 38-kilometer high-speed rail line the government says will run at speeds up to 124 miles per hour. Construction is expected to take around five years. Design work has been handed to Zaha Hadid Architects, the firm behind several large-scale, futuristic airport projects elsewhere in the world.
Ethiopian Airlines is expected to directly fund roughly 30 percent of the project's cost, with the remaining $8 billion still being negotiated with international partners, including the United States, China and Italy. The scale of the undertaking reflects Ethiopia's broader ambition to position itself as a dominant aviation and logistics hub for the continent, building on Ethiopian Airlines' existing role as one of Africa's largest carriers.