This website was set up to help planners and managers of rural road networks in developing countries, and the communities they serve, to pose the questions which should be asked in planning and implementing any program of initiatives to improve rural mobility. The aim is to encourage better outcomes with the limited resources available. The website also seeks to provide access to the growing body of knowledge about rural transport systems of which roads are a vital component.
The website is supported by a number of sector practitioners with extensive working experience around the world.
The need to build or improve as many rural roads as possible to the best technical standards was unquestioned by governments, development agencies and donors for many years. Justification was often seen as a troublesome formality and evaluation models were valued more for their complicity in providing the answers people wanted rather than for their rigour. It was implicitly assumed that a pent-up demand was out there which would generate ever-growing numbers of and larger vehicles, or even that somehow development would spontaneously come into being once the road was built.
It did not. Many rural roads, built expensively to high developed country standards, were little used, and are now dilapidated or even closed since no money, commitment or resources were available to maintain them. This tendency was reinforced by the pressure of donor countries and agencies to disburse, or recipient countries to obtain as much investment as possible, of engineering and construction firms to favour expensive options and the high fees that came with them, and equipment manufacturers to sell their products. These vested interests resisted the introduction of appropriate construction methods using local labour, more viable when labour is abundant and capital scarce, or intermediate equipment methods.
The application of advanced economies’ standards and methods in the developing country environment will always be problematic where the cost of credit (interest rates) may be up to 10 times as high (even if available to local enterprises) and the cost of employing local labour may be up to 20 times cheaper. ‘Technology Transfer’ is not directly appropriate into such a radically different operational environment.
Insufficient attention has been paid to optimising the affordable and sustainable use of local resources: labour, skills, materials, enterprises, manufacture, and indeed communities themselves.
The failure of the ‘traditional’ approaches at last became evident. It was just not sustainable. A road is not an end in itself but rather just one link within a network which in turn must be viewed as a component of a rural transport system, one of many ways of making people more mobile and services and markets more accessible. After all, why not move services closer to the users or vice versa and forget about costly motorable roads? Or just build them for non-motorized vehicles? Ignoring these possibilities leads to unused and unmaintained roads and wasted funds. Sustainability needs collaboration with users at the planning stage to answer basic questions to identify the pertinent road networks, determine the numbers and types of motor and non-motorised vehicles likely to use them and for what reasons, and agree upon what improvement work should be done and preservation arrangements made.
Climatic wear and tear and resulting maintenance needs must also be taken into account. Once built, a road’s maintenance must be entrusted to those who have the knowledge, funds and motivation to carry it out. Historically, this vital dimension has been particularly poorly addressed. Systematic training in managing and doing maintenance supported by guarantees of regular and predictable funding is essential. History can provide useful lessons.
Diffusion of affordable and sustainable approaches has proved to be slow, although progress is being made. Planning of rural roads has been often centred in public works departments who do not have the mandate or incentive to explore other than technical questions, nor the funds to get to the rural areas and fully understand the range of challenges. Roads may be identified without looking at the network they are a part of. The rural transport system of which the road network is a component is rarely looked at in any detail, since facilitating the use of often rare motor vehicles is the main consideration. Indeed, sometimes network considerations are ignored so as to concentrate on a single length of road. Non-motorised users and Intermediate Means of Transport (IMTs), often the vast majority, have been seen as marginal if not downright inconvenient. As a result investments providing greater accessibility to many people are often ignored in favour of stretches of over-designed roads, expensive to maintain and build.
The majority of rural communities depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and survival. Yet the compartmentalisation and isolation of agriculture and transport responsibilities, interests and initiatives at national government and international agency levels deny the cooperation, interdependence and exploitation potentials of these two vital components of the economy.
Improved rural accessibility enables access to agricultural inputs, extension services and lowers transport costs resulting in improved productivity and yields.
With growing concerns regarding climate resilience and water management, and erosion control becoming increasingly important for both the agriculture and roads sectors, the need for sector mutual cooperation is increased.
With Rural Transport contributing to over half of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) it is evident that until efforts to improve rural mobility are vastly enhanced and better directed, then the social and economic development of rural communities and their integration into the wider society will continue to be severely constrained. The adverse impact of the Covid pandemic has made this task all the more urgent.
Finally, corruption, which flourishes in the construction industry where lots of cash is involved and management control is weak, increases significantly the cost of all infrastructure.
This website pivots on six key questions for transport planners and practitioners. These lead to short analyses of related topics sometimes linked to external sites for those who seek more detail.
PowerPoint summaries of many topics are provided for training and briefing purposes. Finally, since history does repeat itself, we have included excursions along historical byroads, although not always in the same tone of high seriousness.
Go to this page for more about the site and this about the persons behind it.
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