Performance Evaluation of Ethiopia’s Road Network Development Planning Policies and Strategies: The Case of RSDP.
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Date
2017-11
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AAU
Abstract
It would be an understatement to begin by suggesting that road network development is one
complex issue that transcends beyond engineering into political, socio-economic and
environmental dimensions. As the Government of Ethiopia strives to uplift the nation into the list
of lower middle income countries by 2025, the road transport sector, as a result of its immense
contribution to enhancing the expansion of infrastructure development, was identified as one of
the seven pillars of the first Growth and Transformation Plan and continues to be a key point in
the second phase of the same Plan. However, as determined in this research through analysis of
interviews and desk reviews, two basic challenges were identified: the planning of Woreda roads
is far from being seamlessly integrated with its implementation; and the maintenance of these
roads is still not yet fully embraced by any entity. As a result, the need for proper organizational
set up with clear regulations and public responsibilities is now important more than ever.
In the aspect of policy performance evaluation schemes and targeted road network indicator
values, the study showed that individual indicators like road density should not be isolated and
treated separately to measure accessibility. Instead, interpreting road density together with
different indicators such as road condition and rural access index gives a better understanding of
the actual situation on the ground. Meanwhile, the targeted road density which was set as a
guarantee for ‘lower middle income’ status has been determined to be overly simplified as
variations in road densities among similar economies are rampant and such an approach
overlooks other important factors which are more strongly associated with the economy.
The research also indicated that the involvement of indigenous road contractors showed
improvement only in terms of number of projects contracted and not in the value of contracts,
indicating that they are largely locked out of lucrative road projects which are dominated by
international contractors. Lastly, analysis of the funding arrangement revealed that traditional
and non-traditional donors have played a fairly massive role in the Ethiopian road network
development even though these two groups of donors follow significantly different partnership
policies.
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Keywords
Access, ERA, DP, Evaluation, Fund (ING), Indicator, Policy, (IES), RAI, Road, RRA, RSDP, Rural, URRAP, Woreda, WRO