Deals

Mali privatises main airport

The government has launched a pre-qualification notice for the 30-year public-private partnership to upgrade and manage Bamako-Sénou airport. The contract will be worth about €100m with interested parties to submit their qualifications by July 30.

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Mali’s transport ministry has started the privatisation of its main airport – Bamako-Sénou – located some 15 kilometres south of Bamako, the capital of the West African nation.

Mali's Bamako-Sénou
airport
The landlocked African country of more than 14 million people is looking for a private partner to manage and upgrade its main airport for a period of 30 years. The project is set to cost some €100 million with over 60 percent of that investment to be deployed over the last ten years of the concession, the transport ministry said in its pre-qualification notice.

Interested parties are expected to submit their qualifications by July 30. According to the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) databse, the Bamako-Sénou concession is the second launched in Africa since 2001.

Conservative estimates from the Mali government estimate that the airport should reach a high of 900,000 passengers by 2015 under an annual four percent growth-rate scenario.
 
However, traffic has been growing at a much higher rate, with a 12.4 percent increase in passenger numbers recorded in 2007 and a 14 percent increase in 2008, according to news agency African Manager.