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Creating rural transport: lessons from a failed road project in South Africa

Are transport planners trying to understand the needs of rural people? How are women’s transport needs different from those of men? Do road projects ease women’s burdens? Are transport policy-makers obsessed with the promotion of motorised transport? Do they know how to assess demand?

A paper from South Africa’s Council for Scientific Industrial Research and the University of the North asks globally applicable questions as it looks critically at a road-upgrading project in an isolated area of South Africa’s Limpopo Province. Lessons from the failure of a well-meaning, but flawed, project are used to draw out gender issues in accessibility and mobility.

The Tshitwe road-upgrading project was intended to provide year-round accessibility, reduce the cost of freight and passenger services and assist agriculture by reducing the costs of inputs, boosting access to extension services and increasing farm-gate prices. The project also sought to increase community ownership and the participation of women. In practice, it provided employment to 47 local women and 67 men from one of the poorest areas in South Africa.

Although the 15 km stretch of road has been built, the project only partially achieved its objectives:

Expected multiplier effects have not happened: money earned by workers has not circulated within the community.
Women were only given menial, poorly paid jobs and acquired no new skills.
As there has been no improvement in road passenger services, access times to markets and health and other facilities have not been reduced.
Apart from food vendoring, which was boosted temporarily during project implementation no new off-farm employment has been generated.
Because there was an inadequate technology transfer to villagers working on the project, particularly women, maintenance of the road will remain a provincial function – thereby denying locals much needed income.
Women still face long walks to fetch water and firewood, carry crops and take children to school.

Conventional transport policies treat communities as uniform and fail to see that women and men have different mobility and accessibility needs. Methods that equate the current travel patterns of a community with its members’ needs and use this to determine the demand ignore those whose voices are not heard.

Radical interventions are required if disadvantaged people in the vast rural areas of South Africa’s former homelands are to be integrated into the national economy. Reducing the transport burden which, isolates already marginalised women should be set as an indicator of the success of interventions aimed at improving the quality of rural life.

Policy-makers are urged to revisit the traditional definition of transport and to:

evaluate whether the current methods of implementing labour-based road works really reduce poverty
realise that locally relevant methods of transport need not be motorised or conventional
stop ignoring or regarding local choices of modes of transport as unimportant
stop applying external categorisations to analyse the purposes for which people make trips
give priority to ensuring continuous and hardened tracks and paths for cart and bicycle transport to reach the nearest major road
encourage the use of non-motorised transport and provide credit facilities to enable wider purchase and use of bicycles, wheelbarrows and carts, especially by women.

Source(s):
‘Social exclusion and rural transport: a road improvement project’, in Balancing the load: women, gender and transport, Priyanthi Fernando and Gina Porter (eds.), Zed Books, by Mac Mashiri and Sabina Mahapa, 2002 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 3 April 2003

Further Information:
Mac Mashiri
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR): Transportek
PO Box 395
Pretoria 0001
South Africa

Tel: +27 (0)12 841 2942
Fax: +27 (0)12 841-4054
Contact the contributor: mmashiri@csir.co.za

CSIR, South Africa

Sabina Mahapa
Mamly’s Interior Décor
Shop 11, Kirkade
Hans van Rensburg Street
Polokwane
South Africa

Tel: +27 (0)15 291 1774
Contact the contributor: sabina@mamlys.co.za

Zed Books
7 Cynthia Street
London N1 9JF
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7837-4014
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7833-3960
Contact the contributor: sales@zedbooks.demon.co.uk

Zed Books

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