"Though roads normally raise output, choice and income …
the poor may gain little …"
--Rural Poverty Report, p. 105

THEME: Rural roads often do not benefit the rural poor as much as they might, and benefit women less than men.

The IFAD Rural Poverty Report 2001 recognizes farm-to-market roads as a key, though not the only, solution, to the market access problems of the rural poor. Indeed, there are many examples of integrated rural development projects where the most appreciated component turned out to be the rural road improvements. But this is not always the case. The report acknowledges that road improvements may not result in marketing benefits to the poorest people. Other studies show that women may end up benefiting even less than men.

Difficult Access to Transport

The main constraint on the impact of tertiary roads is that the poorest people in the developing world have little access to transport. Some do not even have bicycles or animal-drawn carts. Where bicycles exist, men tend to be the owners and users of them. Cultural attitudes sometimes, though not always, frown on women riding bicycles. Animal-drawn carts are often seen as the property of men, and are used mainly by them. In some countries, women are not supposed to handle oxen, in others, they do not handle donkeys. Certainly poor households tend to share the few assets they have. However, when women's groups need to transport vegetables to market or women fish traders have to transport fish, their lack of transport becomes a constraint.

Road Designs That Ignore Pedestrian Traffic

An associated problem with roads is that they are usually built or maintained with vehicular traffic rather than pedestrians in mind. Poor rural women generally walk everywhere they go, including on improved roads. In fact, road improvements can deprive women of the tracks they previously used, leaving them to walk in ditches when roads have no shoulders for walking or when the road surfacing is painful for their feet. The IFAD report refers to a study in Uganda that found that of 715 journeys a day recorded at 55 points on rural roads, 75% were done on foot, 22% on bicycle and only 2% were motorized. This is not an uncommon pattern. While the poor tend to use roads the most for walking, rural road construction is geared to vehicular traffic.

Poor Road Maintenance

The IFAD report acknowledges that rural road maintenance is a problem everywhere and frequently undermines the benefits of rural road improvements. It is quite common for such roads to be impassable during parts of the year in areas of heavy rainfall. The public sector is invariably unable to perform timely periodic, let alone, routine maintenance on roads. A variety of approaches to involve local communities and people in routine road maintenance have been tried all over the world, with mixed success. Women have been active participants in many of these approaches. In fact, when men have migrated, as in many African or Asian countries, it is the women who turn up to provide the labour for cleaning out culverts and repairing potholes.

Development projects need to undertake rural road improvements through a poverty and gender lens. This could lead to a different road design, or to more frequent attention paid to transport needs in conjunction with road improvements. Community responsibility for routine road maintenance is also an issue to be considered. There is considerable experience with a variety of strategies, some of which have proven successful.

Adapted from:

IFAD. 2001. Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty. Oxford University Press. February.

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