Transport

World Bank provides K1bn to repair flood-damaged roads

May 27, 2019
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By Gloria Mbwana

The Roads Authority (RA) says it has acquired K1-bilion from the World Bank to carry out maintenance works on roads which were damaged by floods in 15 districts of the country.

Public Relations Officer (PRO) for Roads Authority Portia Kajanga told Mining and Trade Review that the African Development Bank (AfDB) has also shown interest to bankroll the exercise and is still negotiating with the government on amounts to be disbursed and other logistics.

“The damage caused by floods on the country’s road network was quiet big especially in the southern region of the country such that some roads had to be closed and some areas were cut off for a number of days,” she said.

Districts which were heavily affected by floods include Chiradzulu, Thyolo, Mulanje, Phalombe, Blantyre, Zomba, Nsanje, Chikwawa, Mwanza, Neno, Machinga, Balaka, Mangochi, Ntcheu and Dedza.

Kajanga said government already spent around US$866,000 to repair most of the affected roads by providing diversions for World Food Programme to access cut-off areas with relief items.

She said as an emergency response, RA has deployed emergency contractors to provide temporary routes in all areas where roads were washed away.

“Currently we are in the procurement process of acquiring other contractors to grade the roads once we access funding from AfDB,” she said.

She pointed out that among the affected roads, the most important is the M1 Road in Chikwawa which remained cut for about one and a half days which negatively impacted on travel plans for lots of people and organizations.

Kanjanga said the wash-aways on the Makanjira road also affected many people as the road          remained cut for three days before completion of construction of an alternative route.

Besides repairing the roads damaged by floods, the Roads Authority has lined up a number of road projects including construction of the 25.9km Nsanje-Marka Road which is part of a regional route connecting Malawi with the Port of Beira in Mozambique and beyond.

RA also plans to reconstruct and widen the Kaphatenga – Dwangwa Road in Nkhotakota  District and the work will involve replacing single lane and temporary bridges with permanent two lane bridges for the section spanning from Nkhotakota – Bua Bridge.

The other project on the cards is the rehabilitation of the 45km Mzimba – Mzarangwe which is of the key roads in the Northern Region of Malawi.

RA will also reconstruct and upgrade the Chiringa-Muloza road in Mulanje and Rumphi-Nyika-Chitipa road in the northern region which is currently of earth standard and will be upgraded to bitumen Class 1.

Malawi’s public road network coverage by end June 2016 remained 15.451km out of which about 28% are paved and 72% is earth/gravel surface.

Road re-classification studies done in 2016 identified about 9,478km of undesignated road network that serve the rural communities.

Road handles more than 70% on internal freight and 99% of passenger traffic, and more than 90% of international freight and passenger traffic.

Studies indicate that in Malawi, 55% of the costs of production are taken up by transportation costs as compared to 17% of other developing countries.

The condition of paved road network as indicated in a study conducted in June 2014 is 38% good, 40% fair and 22% poor.

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