Commercializing Africa's Roads : Transforming the Role of the Public Sector
Road transport is the dominant mode of transport in sub-Saharan Africa, carrying close to 90 percent of the region's passenger and freight transport, and providing the only access to rural communities where over 70 percent of Africans live. De...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/1995/02/1615056/commercializing-africas-roads-transforming-role-public-sector http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10000 |
| Summary: | Road transport is the dominant mode of
transport in sub-Saharan Africa, carrying close to 90
percent of the region's passenger and freight
transport, and providing the only access to rural
communities where over 70 percent of Africans live. Despite
their importance, most of the region's nearly 2 million
km of roads are poorly managed and badly maintained. By
1990, nearly a third of the $150 billion invested in roads
had been eroded through lack of maintenance. To restore only
those roads that are economically justified and prevent
further deteriorations will require annual expenditures of
at least $1.5 billion over the next ten years, or more than
double the requirements of regular maintenance. To find
sustainable solutions to these problems, the United Nations
Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the World Bank
launched the Road Maintenance Initiative (RMI) as part of
the sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP).
With support from a number of bilateral donors, the
Initiative has spent the last six years working with African
countries to identify the causes of poor road maintenance
policies and to develop an agency for reforming them. The
key concept to emerge from the debate on how to strengthen
financing and management of roads is commercialiation: bring
roads into the marketplace and put them on a fee for service
basis. However, since roads are and will largely remain a
public monopoly, commercialization requires complementary reforms. |
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