Africa FDM™

Africa Freight Demand Model™

The Africa Freight Demand Model (Africa FDM™) is being developed to provide intelligence on freight flows in Africa. In doing so, the Africa FDM™ aims to support informed macrologistics decision-making and planning regarding areas such as infrastructure development, resilience, food security and green minerals.

The initial stages of modelling all African trade and related geographical disaggregation used supply and demand to provide a total freight flow view of Africa’s agricultural, mining and manufacturing commodities. An initial example of the modelling outputs for all African agriculture is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Africa’s agriculture freight flows (Africa FDM™ data for 2021)

Additionally, the model enables a disaggregated view of trade (export and import) and domestic freight flows of Africa’s agriculture, mining, and manufacturing commodities. See Figure 2 for an example of this disaggregation for Africa’s agriculture.

Figure 2: Africa’s agriculture disaggregated by trade and domestic freight flows (Africa FDM™ data for 2021)

The most recent Africa FDM™ modelling outputs provide a full view of Africa’s sectoral (agriculture, mining and manufacturing) freight flows. These flows can be viewed as total flows including sea links or as land-based freight flows, which exclude sea links and are each shown on their own scale. These total and land-based freight flow maps are provided below, for agricultural (Figures 3 and 4), mining (Figures 5 and 6), manufacturing (Figures 7 and 8) and total freight (Figures 9 and 10), respectively.  

Figure 3: Africa’s total agricultural freight flows (including sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 4: Africa’s land-based agricultural freight flows (excluding sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 5: Africa’s total mining freight flows (including sea links and to own scale) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 6: Africa’s land-based mining freight flows (excluding sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 7: Africa’s total manufacturing freight flows (including sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 8: Africa’s land-based manufacturing freight flows (excluding sea links and to own scale) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 9: Africa’s total freight flows (including sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

Figure 10: Africa’s land-based freight flows (excluding sea links) based on the most recent Africa FDM™ data

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