David worked as a consultant on the planning and appraisal and evaluation of projects in many countries for some forty years. Observing the futility of many rural road investments which saw roads only as ends in themselves,he adopted the broader goal of trying to make rural services more accessible to users not only by making them more mobile but also by taking account of the many other sectors involved in rural infrastructure provision. Remember that roads are a means, among others, to make people more mobile. Whether this will facilitate access to wells, clinics, schools or markets must be looked at critically . Maybe people, especially the poor, cannot afford to use them. Perhaps building clinics and schools closer to where they live would be better. This site looks at how to take both mobility and accessibility into account and hopefully lead to better informed decisions.
1903 De Dion Bouton with my grandparents and driver.
My work and also, I admit, my life-long affection for cars, perhaps inherited as witnessed by this photo, also dating from my childhood hours sitting behind the wheel in the the family’s’ garage-bound 1935 Austin Seven , grounded by war restrictions on private motoring, led me to an interest in the history of roads and road transport which I feel is pertinent. A good slice of the site has been kidnapped by this subject as you will see.
Robert has more than 49 years of professional experience working in over 40 African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Pacific and European countries, of which 42 years have been involved with developing countries and transport infrastructure for inter-urban routes and rural communities. Most of Rob’s assignments in this period have been on the research, development and dissemination of appropriate technology roadworks and infrastructure, and intermediate technology equipment to support local-resource-based roadworks. He has been involved with the development of systems, technologies and techniques appropriate for a range of limited resource environments; making best use of local resources such as labour, local materials, locally made equipment and local enterprises.
Worst career experience: Sitting on an upturned plastic beer crate in the back of an ancient seaplane in the Solomon Islands as the proper seats had been removed to lose weight because the designer’s rated horse power (160kW) was found to be grossly over estimated! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_RC-3_Seabee#Specifications This partly explains why it took three attempts to take off from a lagoon with me as a passenger.
Emmanuel is an engineer specialized in road design and management who is a graduate of École Polytechnique de Montréal (B.Sc. in Civil Engineering) and École de Technologie Supérieure de Montréal (M.Sc. in Design and Rehabilitation of Structures and PhD. in Engineering). The study of roads, in general, has always been a passion for me. This passion has led me to enhance my knowledge on the structural design of pavements as well as the analysis of the entire life cycle of pavements by considering in addition to the technical criterion the three pillars of sustainable development which are the economy, the social, and the environment.
I am also specialized in the use of road design and management software tools for road data analysis as well as the interpretation of the generated results. These tools include ALIZE-LCPC, KENPAVE (KENLAYER and KENSLAB), CHAUSSÉE 2, WinJulea, PROVAL, SAS, SPSS, and HDM-4, etc.
Kingstone Gongera has been working on roads for the past 39 years in Zimbabwe and within Sub-Saharan Africa. He was involved in the planning of the entire rural road network in Zimbabwe where 25 000 km of rural roads were mapped, constructed and a robust road maintenance regime established using one of the most unique intermediate technologies so far tried and tested. The use of agricultural tractors and non-motorized towed graders. Kingstone has also worked on similar projects in Mozambique, Zambia and the Gambia. He has passionately pursued the road asset management of rural roads, participating in capacity building and training in more than 10 countries within the African continent.
Kingstone ventured into private consultancy after spending over 20 years in the public sector in Zimbabwe.
