In accordance with Irish Aid’s policy of addressing basic needs, rural transport and in particular transport at the household level is an essential component to any plan to reduce rural poverty.

Without adequate access farmers cannot get their crops to markets and will revert to subsistence farming. Women and children will delay or avoid attending clinics; the clinics themselves will only be effective if medical personnel and the required medications can reach the clinics. Teachers will be reluctant to travel to remote areas and all levels of society in a remote area are severely disadvantaged by the lack of social and economic opportunities that arise from reliable access. In short without reliable access the rural poor will remain trapped in poverty.

Whether at primary, secondary or tertiary levels of the road network the need for effective road management and in particular maintenance funding is paramount. A study by World Bank in 1988 estimated that in the 85 countries that had received World Bank assistance for roads, allocations for maintenance had been so low that up to 25% of the paved roads had to be reconstructed.

It is now clear that managing roads is a “big business” and must be treated on a commercial basis. The current trend is that the relevant Works Ministry should concentrate on setting policy and monitoring performance of the sector with contract management of at least the primary network overseen by a dedicated roads agency with competent staff. The emergence of dedicated Road Funds is finally creating a secure though still inadequate level of funding to allow road managers to base their work plans on realistic budget figures.

While Irish Aid concentrates on the area of rural transport, it recognises that rural roads are merely the initial link in the overall transport network linked to the outside world by the regional paved road network and ultimately internationally by air or sea ports. A relevant example is the importance of trunk road corridors in Mozambique and Tanzania which are essential to much of the trade into Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. In the case of Ethiopia the improved response to the current famine is in no small part due to the rehabilitation of the trunk road network enabling food supplies to reach the holding centres.