The 2025 Container Port Performance Index places Somalia’s main gateway above its larger East African neighbours.

Mogadishu’s container port recorded its strongest result in six years in the World Bank’s latest assessment of global port efficiency, the bank reported this month.

The Container Port Performance Index 2025, published by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence, ranks more than 400 container ports by the time vessels spend in port, adjusted for ship and cargo size. A positive score means a port turns ships around faster than the 2024 global average; a negative score means slower.

Mogadishu placed 127th with a score of 13.9, clearing the global benchmark for the first time and continuing a steady climb from a score of 1 in 2020. The report records that 87 percent of vessel time at the port in 2025 was spent at berth working cargo rather than waiting at anchor, a high share for a low-income port and the measure the World Bank treats as the clearest sign of productive operations. The score draws on 105 vessel calls. The result places Mogadishu ahead of Mombasa, which fell to 396th in 2025, and Dar es Salaam at 255th. Among East African mainland ports, only Djibouti ranked materially higher, at 53rd. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the regional average stood at -72.0.

Berbera, on Somalia’s northwestern coast, carries no score in the 2025 ranking. The port had appeared in earlier editions, but its score had already slipped from 31 in 2023 to -3 in 2024 before the data thinned further. The recent conflict in the Strait of Hormuz has put considerable strains on the Gulf of Aden shipping that Berbera relies on. We have examined what that disruption has looked like for Somalia here.