Publications

ASIST Bulletin no. 10, January 2000

Self-contracting
A new approach to effective road maintenance in Kenya?

By Andreas Beusch, Intech, Switzerland

Volunteer road rehabilitation
Illustration by Dan Amayo

Over the last few decades the Kenyan authorities have tried to cope with the ever-increasing maintenance workload on the country's road network. Much has been tried out, starting from the taking-over of the colonial system, to engaging the advisory services of a battalion of consultants, to begging donors to repeatedly rehabilitate the same roads in turns, to actually trying out maintenance works using equipment or labour, or both together.

However, there seems to be some light on the horizon. No, it's not the new Roads Board that will be soon introduced and it's also not the new wind that blows through the civil service corridors after the appointment of the new Head of Civil Service. It's a new phenomenon from the ever creative and innovative private sector, which should draw particular interest from the ILO and donor agencies. Small groups of unemployed youths, usually young men with the ambition to become successful businessmen, organise themselves to enter the market of road maintenance.

In a first preparatory phase, critical road sections are identified that are within walking distance from where the community lives. These are usually sections on a bitumen road with countless potholes so close to each other that motorists have to slow down to walking speed. In a next step the traffic pattern is analysed to find out on which days and at which hours the traffic is likely to be high so that the road users can be effectively addressed to contribute in the funding of the urgent maintenance work. Available local resources in terms of hand tools and construction material are then made available. The fill material for the potholes is usually gathered from the existing shoulder, which was constructed using properly graded gravel. The young men then attempt to fill the potholes the best way they know how, and rely on passing motorists to give them handouts.

Numerous of these ‘emerging local contractors' can be seen on heavily trafficked roads in rural as well as urban areas. A field analysis of these projects, carried out by the author of this article, shows extraordinary success:

• It is a true self-help approach without any donor involvement, where the direct beneficiaries are the communities living next to the potholed road sections.
• The ‘pothole taxpayers' are also direct beneficiaries of the new system since they are actually the ones who caused the potholes in the first place.
• It encourages young people to ‘start their own business', and therefore creates employment.
• The risk of not having a constant and continuous flow of work for these emerging contractors, as is the case in so many donor-driven contractor development programmes, is minimised.
• A clever pothole management system, designed by these creative and dynamic contractors themselves, ensures that there are always some potholes to be filled, even if it means reinstating them back to their original size over night.
• The only risk these self-contracted small-scale contractors face could be the unlikely event that the government would wake up one day and actually start to maintain roads on its own. However, as recent history has shown, this risk is rather theoretical and hypothetical.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this very promising approach is encouraging. It is an exemplary development process driven by local communities based on their own capacity to grow, by utilising the locally available resources to the maximum. The approach is independent from the influence of politicians and donors. As long as there are potholes, and as long as there is traffic on these roads, the approach is truly sustainable. Could this, consequently, be an approach to be seriously considered by the ILO in their new struggle to mainstream and institutionalise the labour-based technology in all infrastructure sectors in a sustainable way?