Perennial funding shortfall affecting development of key agriculture link roads

Lack of sufficient and timely funding is hurting efforts to improve roads in rural areas, motorways that are key to the growth of the agriculture sector.

Statistics show that the Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KeRRA), which is tasked with maintaining such roads, missed its target of preserving 115,000 kilometres (km) of road in the 2014/2015 fiscal year.

The agency was unable to maintain 17,485 km of scheduled roads work—dealing a blow to thousands of farmers and businesses in rural areas.

The authority had budgeted for Sh31.9 billion to fix roads in the fiscal year but the disbursements by the Treasury were Sh4.4 billion less, affecting its aim of upgrading some roads to bitumen standard.

“Those funds were inadequate to effectively cover the planned road works and as a result the authority was unable to upgrade some of the targeted works to bitumen standards,” said KeRRA in its newly published 2014/2015 annual report.

Meet targets

During the 2014/15 financial year the authority received approximately Sh16.6 billion under the development budget against a proposed a budget of Sh18.3 billion for construction of rural roads to bitumen standards to enable it meet targets.

The country’s road network is currently undergoing a major inventory as the government moves to update its records to capture the full length and conditions of motorways to aid in planning for expansion and maintenance.

The Kenya Roads Board (KRB), which is charged with approval of road maintenance plans, said the audit will be carried out across the 47 counties – clustered as western, coastal and central – with financing from the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA).

Roads constitute the most important mode of transport in the country today, accounting for the transportation of more than 95 per cent of all freight and passenger traffic.

Although the country’s overall road network has been estimated at 250,000 km, to date only 160,886 km of this network has been mapped and classified.

Between 2001 and 2004, the Ministry of Roads, with financing from the World Bank, engaged a consultant to classify Kenyan road network using global positioning systems (GPS).

The Road Inventory and Condition Survey (RICS) led to the establishment of a database for classified roads in a geographical information system (GIS) for a network totalling 61,946 km.

However, the extent of the unclassified rural and urban roads remained unknown and was estimated to range from 80,000 km to 130,00 km.

In another attempt to update the country’s road inventory records, the KRB with funding from the Nordic Development Fund and World Bank, undertook a road inventory and condition survey for the hitherto unclassified road network between 2007 and 2009.

The unclassified roads inventory captured a total of 98,941 km, bringing the inventoried network to 160,886 km which is presently held in a consolidated GIS database at KRB.