Publications

ASIST Bulletin no. 10, January 2000

‘Realising benefits' using road committees

Experience from Western Uganda

Graphic [By Jo Leyland, Community Participation Specialist, Kenya
Local community enjoying the benefits of an improved road]

The Western Uganda Road Maintenance Capacity Building Project which is jointly funded by the British and Ugandan governments supports the Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (MoWHC) in the rehabilitation and routine maintenance of selected gravel trunk roads in western Uganda. Unusually for a trunk road project, it has quite a substantial community participation component. Whilst the project does not expect local communities to freely provide labour or materials, it has developed approaches to involve local communities as important stakeholders in the trunk road network.

The main mechanism has been to establish road committees at sub-county level composed of the local leaders of villages and parishes along the road plus women, youth and other sub-county representatives. The MoWHC and project staff conduct one-day workshops with the committees to inform and sensitise them about the impending rehabilitation contracts and issues related to road maintenance such as the importance of drainage, road reserves, access to borrow pits, road safety etc. Site visits hosted by the MoWHC are then conducted along the roads with representatives from the road committees and the contractor, both at the start of the contract and during the defect liability period following completion of the works. These have provided a very useful opportunity to identify problems, make minor amendments to the works to improve the design or to address local needs (such as including a parking bay for a local roadside market), make the contractor's work easier by establishing good local relations, and have the MoWHC seen to be more responsive and accountable to local residents who are government taxpayers.

By assessing the significant positive economic and social changes and being able to attribute them to the road improvement, it helps to reinforce the importance of maintaining the road in a good condition in order to retain those benefits. This encourages the local communities to play a more pro-active role in protecting the improved road and liaising with the MoWHC. Another aspect analysed during the impact workshops is who benefits most and who least from the road improvement. Those with poor access to the road and being more remote from it are far less likely to benefit from the increased trading options or improved access to facilities such as health units. Whilst the districts are responsible for the maintenance of the district (feeder) roads, sub-counties are responsible for their own community (access) roads. The amount of investment in the rehabilitation of the stretch of the trunk road passing through their sub-county is likely to be of the order of the sub-county's annual tax revenue and is unlikely to be repeated for some time. With this investment and the potential benefits to be realised, it can spur local communities themselves to improve their access to the main road. During the initial road committee workshops, the passability of the roads accessing the trunk road is identified using a simple ranking system. It helps to highlight the access constraints faced by sub-county residents. For example, 57 roads were identified within two sub-counties in Kabarole and Masindi districts and of those, 37% were impassable and 28% were passable to bicycle or motorcycle only. Most of the remainder were passable by 2WD vehicles in the dry season only.

Not only is it important for the local communities to analyse the impact of the road improvement for themselves, it is also much quicker for the project that is tasked with monitoring and evaluating activities to obtain a good picture of the changes that have taken place. These changes may be in vehicle ownership and operation patterns, business activities, agricultural production, use of social services etc. This is done both by distributing a questionnaire to each sub-county prior to the workshop, and from the group discussion sessions and presentations. The 7-day traffic counts carried out by the project prior to and after each road improvement also indicate quantitative changes in local economic activity and travel.

During the first implementation phase of the project, rehabilitation contracts were equipment based but it was realised that despite good intentions, there was very limited scope for employing significant numbers of local people in the works and even less chance of employing women. Thus, in the second and final implementation phase that started last year, a number of roads are going to be rehabilitated using labour-based methods and employing not less than 30% women as labourers. Then, as well as the benefits from the actual road improvement, local people will benefit from the cash injection into the local economy as a result of the increased employment opportunities available. The project is also looking at ways of optimising the technical skills that the local people acquire so that they can use them to improve their own road network. Again, the road committee approach is helping considerably in informing local people of what is being planned and in advertising the availability of work to women and men. For the first road being rehabilitated using labour-based methods in an area where women have not worked on the roads, a third of the applicants were women, which helps to make the recruitment process fairer.