Abidjan

C'est Yilim, artiste, chanteuse, Ivoirienne.

Nous sommes en ce moment à Abidjan, sur BBC This is Africa.

Hi Yee Kings, hope you're good.

It's Yilim, singer from Ivory Coast.

Right now, we are in Abidjan and you are listening to BBC This is Africa.

Cette année-là, je ne sais pas ce qui vient.

Mais au nom de Dieu, quelque chose va se passer.

So it wouldn't be surprising if one day you see a venue or an event space named after me or my mother, because that's really one of my dreams.

Verse four, Iddo, Ginnetho, Abijah.

Not Abidjan.

Abijah.

That's verse four.

A type of capital.

Abidjan is there by Yamsukro.

It's one of the main cities.

Where the president.

With a booming population, a coastal stretch of West Africa is set to become one of the most populous urban regions in the world in the next decade.

A string of large cities poised to rival global megalopolises, like the corridor from Boston to Washington in the U.S., Tying them together would be a long-promised, repeatedly delayed superhighway that could slash travel time and supercharge trade from Lagos, Nigeria to Abidjan in Ivory Coast.

But the task of harnessing that potential has barely been met.

NPR's Emmanuel Akinwotu takes us along a section of the road to understand why.

Almost everyone who travels

by road west from Lagos to Abidjan knows the toughest part of the journey is at the beginning, on the notorious Lagos-Padagri road towards the border with Benin.

And it starts at the Mile 2 bus station here in Lagos.

For years, this has been the key gateway to the region, where drivers call for passengers travelling to cities all along the coast.

But it's still something that is still at a very early stage.

You travel to cities like Dakar or Lagos or Abidjan in the downtown areas you would see mostly chefs preparing western food you know you'd even see like you know even sushis and stuff that are not even part of our direct colonial past but you know that's just to tell you the priority you know they still like think you know that the the other cuisines uh the ones that are worthy to be presented in the the you know the best addresses to get great food great local food you have to go in the neighborhoods you have to go in the homes, you know, or, you know, in Abidjan, you go to the maquis, you know, that's where the locals eat.

And there it's like, you know, it's not, yeah, it's not fancy.

It's like you eat, you know, on the bare table or on the bench and stuff.

Much bigger ships.

Yeah, very modern terminals in Temur, Lomé, Abidjan, Pointe d'Ivoire, operating vessels far more efficiently often than more established ports in Europe or North America.

But moving the cargo in and out of the port remains a real bottleneck.

And some of the upswing in port time we've seen is down to larger vessels, which obviously need more time in port.