By Univar Logistics Limited | Freight Intelligence for East Africa
Picture a 40-tonne truck loaded with imported goods leaving the Port of Mombasa, crawling through the Mlolongo weighbridge, climbing through Nairobi, and pushing west toward Kampala — 1,200 kilometres, two border crossings, four days. The shipper pays a freight rate. The cargo arrives. The truck turns around.
And comes back empty.
This is the return load problem — also called the backhaul problem — and it is one of the single biggest structural inefficiencies in East African freight logistics. It inflates transport costs, wastes fuel, contributes to corridor congestion, and suppresses the earnings of truck owners and drivers who have no choice but to absorb the dead weight of the return journey.
It is also, largely, an unsolved problem. But new tools and models are beginning to change that.
A backhaul, or return load, is freight carried by a truck on its return trip after completing a primary delivery. The opposite — running back without cargo — is called deadheading or an empty return trip.
The economics are straightforward: a truck costs almost the same to operate whether it is carrying 30 tonnes or nothing. Fuel, driver wages, tyres, depreciation, insurance, road tolls, and border fees are largely fixed per kilometre regardless of whether the vehicle is loaded. When a truck returns empty, those costs are entirely absorbed by the outbound load — effectively doubling the real cost per freight unit.
When a return load is secured, those fixed operating costs are distributed across two revenue legs. The truck owner earns twice. The shipper on the return leg benefits from a discounted rate (since the operator is willing to move at a lower margin rather than run empty). Corridor efficiency improves. Emissions per tonne of freight moved drop.
The problem is that on most East African corridors, the conditions that would make return loads routine — balanced trade flows, accessible freight matching infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks that allow cross-border backloading — do not yet exist in full.
The numbers are significant. According to research published in a 2025 peer-reviewed logistics study and NCTTCA corridor data, between 30 and 40 percent of logistics trucks in Africa travel empty, either on the initial run or the backhaul. That figure represents a massive structural inefficiency at the heart of the continent’s freight system.
On the Northern Corridor — the arterial road route linking the Port of Mombasa to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and Eastern DRC — the problem is documented in granular detail by the Northern Corridor Transit and Transport Coordination Authority (NCTTCA):
The NCTTCA has explicitly identified empty return trips — alongside trade imbalance, non-harmonised road charges, and infrastructure gaps — as a primary driver of the high transport costs that make the Northern Corridor more expensive than it should be.
At the global level, the data reinforces the scale of the issue. The American Transport Research Institute (ATRI) found that in the US — a market with far more mature freight matching infrastructure — 20.7% of the 9.4 billion miles driven by licensed trucking businesses were empty, costing the industry USD 3.3 billion in deadhead miles at USD 1.69 per empty mile. In East Africa, where freight matching infrastructure is less developed and trade flows are more imbalanced, the proportion of empty miles is materially higher.
Several structural factors make the return load challenge worse in East Africa than in more developed freight markets.
The fundamental driver is a structural trade imbalance. The East African hinterland — Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Eastern DRC — is overwhelmingly import-heavy. Goods flow inward from Mombasa in high volume: fuel, manufactured goods, electronics, food products, construction materials, vehicles. But the return export flows — primarily agricultural commodities, minerals, and manufactured goods — are smaller in volume, less predictable in timing, and more fragmented in origin.
A truck that delivers a 20-tonne consignment to Kampala cannot simply fill up with 20 tonnes of exports for the return. The export cargo may not be ready, may not be at the right point, may require a different vehicle configuration, or simply may not exist in equivalent volume. The corridor was built on and remains dominated by import flows.
Cabotage rules — which regulate whether a foreign-registered truck can pick up and carry domestic freight within another country — create a legal constraint on backloading. A Kenyan truck that delivers to Kampala cannot, in most cases, pick up Ugandan domestic freight for onward movement within Uganda. It can only carry cargo destined for export back to Kenya or another international point.
These regulations exist to protect domestic transport industries, but their practical effect is to limit the universe of return loads available to any given truck. A Kenyan transporter coming back from Kampala is restricted to internationally-tradeable cargo rather than the full range of available freight.
Research on the Africa Cross-Border Road Freight Transport market specifically cites cabotage bans and axle-load policy fragmentation as factors that “inflate backhaul costs” and keep capacity utilisation and rate stability “vulnerable.”
Different EAC Partner States apply different maximum vehicle weight limits. Kenya enforces stricter axle load regulations than some neighbouring countries. A truck that is legally loaded for Uganda may need to shed weight before entering Kenya, or vice versa. This mismatch discourages cross-border backloading and reduces the commercially viable return load options for operators.
In mature freight markets, load boards and freight matching platforms are a standard part of the industry architecture. A truck driver finishing a delivery in Atlanta logs onto DAT or TruckStop, searches available loads within a 50-kilometre radius, and has a return booking within hours. The entire matching process is digitalised, transparent, and accessible.
In East Africa, this infrastructure has historically been almost entirely absent. Backhaul freight was found through phone calls, personal networks, roadside brokers, and luck. Trucking companies with large fleets could optimise internally. Owner-operators — who make up a substantial portion of the East African haulage market — had no systematic way to find return cargo. Many routinely deadheaded because the search cost and uncertainty of finding a load was not worth the time.
This is changing, but the platforms are still nascent.
Consider a simplified example on the Mombasa-Nairobi-Kampala corridor:
Cost Component Per Trip (Loaded) Per Trip (Empty Return) Fuel (1,200 km, ~0.35L/km, Ksh 180/L) ~KES 75,600 ~KES 63,000* Driver wages (4-day trip) ~KES 12,000 ~KES 12,000 Tolls, weighbridge, border fees ~KES 15,000 ~KES 15,000 Tyre wear and depreciation ~KES 18,000 ~KES 16,000 Total operating cost ~KES 120,600 ~KES 106,000 Revenue generated Freight rate earned Zero
*Empty trucks consume marginally less fuel but all other fixed costs remain.
An operator running Mombasa-Kampala weekly, returning empty half the time, loses the equivalent of approximately 26 return trip revenues per year — costs incurred with no offsetting income. Across a fleet of ten trucks, this represents a substantial annual structural loss that gets baked into outbound freight rates, making Kenyan and regional imports more expensive for everyone.
The most direct intervention is connecting shippers with available trucks in real time. Several platforms are now targeting this specifically in the East African and broader African context:
Apexloads — A Kenya-anchored logistics operating system that combines a load board, transport management system (TMS), CRM, real-time shipment visibility, and invoice factoring in a single platform. Built specifically for African logistics challenges, Apexloads allows transporters to post empty trucks and shippers to post available freight, creating a digital matching layer that previously required phone calls and guesswork. Users report reductions in wait times of up to 38%.
Bandika LoadBoard — A digital freight matching platform designed to connect shippers, transporters, and logistics providers across Africa in real time. Bandika integrates with telematics, ECTS (Electronic Cargo Tracking Systems), and fleet management systems, and is optimised for both urban and rural operators — addressing the inclusivity gap that excludes smaller and rural transporters from digital freight markets.
Truck Services Africa — An Africa-specific load board platform that connects truckers with available freight loads, targeting the connectivity gap for operators who have historically relied on informal matching networks.
DHL’s Saloodo! — Operating in over 55 countries across four continents, Saloodo uses big data and algorithms specifically to optimise truck return runs — a direct commercial response to the deadheading problem at global scale.
The load board model works because it aggregates supply and demand that would otherwise never connect. A truck finishing a cement delivery in Kisumu that needs a return load to Nairobi, and a flower exporter in Naivasha that needs space to Mombasa, have a common interest — but without a platform, those two parties have no way of finding each other in time.
For corridors where no single shipper has a full truckload to offer on the return, consolidation — combining smaller shipments from multiple shippers into one vehicle — converts multiple partial loads into a viable return cargo. Freight forwarders who actively manage groupage services on high-volume corridors can keep trucks loaded in both directions more consistently.
This requires the forwarder to maintain commercial relationships and visibility on both the outbound and return freight markets — a capability that distinguishes active freight managers from passive clearing agents.
The structural solution to an imbalanced corridor is balancing the trade. Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya all have agricultural and manufactured goods that can move in higher volume toward Mombasa for export. Investments in export processing, cold chain infrastructure, and export facilitation reduce the trade imbalance that underpins the empty return problem.
This is a long-cycle intervention that requires government policy, private sector investment, and donor support. But the direction of travel — driven in part by the AfCFTA and the EAC Common Market Protocol — is toward a more balanced regional trade structure that would organically improve backhaul utilisation.
Larger operators can structure their fleets as hub-and-spoke networks rather than point-to-point routes, with regional depots at key corridor nodes (Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali) where outbound and return loads are matched before trucks depart. This internal optimisation doesn’t require a public load board — it requires the fleet size and operational sophistication to manage load matching internally.
Relaxing cabotage restrictions on a reciprocal basis — allowing Kenyan trucks to carry domestic Ugandan freight and vice versa — would immediately expand the universe of return loads available to any given operator. The EAC has the institutional framework to negotiate such arrangements. Progress has been slow, but the economic case is unambiguous.
If you are an importer clearing goods through Mombasa and distributing inland, the backhaul problem affects you even if you never see an empty truck. The freight rates you pay on inbound cargo are priced to recover the cost of the return — empty or not. Shippers on heavily deadheaded corridors subsidise the inefficiency of the system through higher outbound rates.
There is a commercial opportunity here. Businesses that can offer consistent, reliable return freight to transporters — agricultural exports, manufacturing outputs, containerised goods moving to the coast — are in a position to negotiate meaningfully lower outbound freight rates. The transporter who knows they can load both ways prices the outbound leg differently than one who expects to return empty.
At Univar Logistics Limited, we work with importers, exporters, and distributors to optimise freight across the full movement — not just the inbound leg. Understanding the return load landscape is part of how we identify cost savings and build supply chain efficiency for our clients across the East African corridor.
If you move freight regularly on any of the major East African corridors and want to explore whether backhaul optimisation could reduce your logistics costs, get in touch.
Sources: NCTTCA — Multiple Impact of Empty Freight Transport Trips along the Northern Corridor; ScienceDirect — Data-driven insights into truck utilisation challenges in freight logistics (2025); ATRI (American Transport Research Institute) cost benchmarking; The East African newspaper, corridor rate analysis (2024); Kpler — East African port and corridor intelligence (March 2026); Mordor Intelligence — Africa Cross-Border Road Freight Transport Market (2026); Apexloads, Bandika LoadBoard platform documentation. This article is for informational purposes and reflects available data as of mid-2025.