Roads and their Impact on the Quality of Life in Africa
The lack of infrastructure already deters growth in Africa. And the continent needs a road network that is resistant to climate change to prevent major damage to growth, nutrition and health.
In late July, the Ethiopian government declared three days of mourning after the Gofa Zone saw its worst landslide in Ethiopia's history, with 257 people confirmed dead and an estimated 500 missing and perished in total. Ethiopia is not alone, however. Just last month, a dam collapsed and flooded parts of Borno State, Nigeria, causing the country’s worst flood in decades, with 200,000-300,000 people displaced and one million impacted. In 2022, South Sudan reported that 66 percent of the country was under water due to extreme flooding. Then in March of this year, schools in South Sudan were forced to close because of deadly heat waves and the lack of proper ventilation.
The compounded impact of extreme climate events, poor infrastructure, and limited national budgets illustrates an urgent need to address, design, and fund climate resilient infrastructure on the continent. In this article, I will focus on the challenges of developing all-weather roads specifically and the consequences of waiting to expand Africa’s road networks. Roads directly impact almost every aspect of quality of life on the continent, from access to healthcare facilities and schools to facilitating trade and boosting local and national economies.
The Cost of Building Roads
Over the last 20 years, Africa has been the only region in the world that saw declining road density. For context, building roads in Africa is a daunting challenge: on average, low-income countries have 134 kilometers of paved road per 100 square kilometers of land, but in Africa there are only 31 kilometers of paved road per 100 square kilometers of land. And South Africa alone has 30 percent of the continent’s paved roads. Africa has continued to be a global outlier in transportation barriers.
For many African governments with fragile economies or in debt destress, building roads is financially burdensome. Paved road construction costs over $400,000/km on average, according to a 2008 market analysis of road construction in sub-Saharan Africa, but costs can vary widely, from $1,000,000/km in Uganda to $300,000/km in Kenya (Figure 1). For low-income countries that are facing multiple crises, paved road construction is cost prohibitive and often results in disparities between urban, township, and rural regions.
This means that many of the 60 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa who live outside urban areas lack all-weather roads (that is, roads paved with Portland cement or asphalt concrete). Paved roads are crucial to withstanding the deterioration of roads from environmental impacts. It is worth noting, however, that both asphalt and cement are carbon intensive in their production. Globally, cement production alone is responsible for 7 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and cement—the most used man-made material—is projected to grow in production by 12 to 23 percent by 2050. Meeting the financial burden of building roads with the environmental challenges is crucial to building sustainable African communities and closing the infrastructure gap on the continent.
According to the African Development Bank, closing the infrastructure gap on the continent will cost an estimated $130 to $170 billion each year for the next ten years, and yet there is a funding deficit of $68 to $108 billion. In addition to the funding deficit, Deputy Executive Secretary Antonio Pedro of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) explained in a recent conversation at the Center for Global Development that climate events are costing African countries between 5 to 15 percent of GDP in damage recovery.
Ultimately, climate-resilient infrastructure is, “infrastructure that is planned, designed, built and operated with changing climate impacts in mind...but also be able to recover quickly after disruptions.”
Trade and Business Ecosystem
Building roads is already expensive, but the cost of recovery and rebuilding after an extreme climate event is unbearable for most African countries. The lack of climate-resilient roads also has a substantial impact on trade and economic opportunities.
Figure 1 The Cost of Road Building in Africa (in Dollar per Kilometer)
Upon its ratification in 2021, there was great enthusiasm and optimism for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which promised to bring millions out of poverty by liberalizing and integrating economies, products, standards, resources, and infrastructure across the continent. Since then, many policymakers, investors, and businesses have critiqued the AfCFTA for its lack of implementation and efficiency. A major impediment for the AfCFTA continues to be the lack of fair-quality, reliable road systems. This is made evident as 70 percent of the continent’s GDP is constituted by five coastal countries, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola . And at the same time, 90 percent of passenger travel and 80 percent of goods on the continent are transported via roads. Even though “roads are the arteries through which the economy pulses,” the continent is clearly unable to utilize the full economic potential of international and intra-African trade without sufficient roads networks. The OECD estimates that improving transport infrastructure on the continent could boost GDP by an additional 2.2 percent a year. Currently, challenges in transporting goods on the continent are responsible for an additional 30 to 40 percent of the final cost of goods traded intra-Africa, and up to 60 percent for landlocked countries.
Food Insecurity
Climate disasters and economic obstacles due to poor infrastructure are closely interlinked with food insecurity on the continent. After the previously mentioned flood in Nigeria’s Borno State, the Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) in the region said, “More recently, we have seen food inflation, food prices have been skyrocketing, really affecting millions of people who are facing food insecurity...We need more resources to save lives...and also think of longer-term recovery and solutions.” Without the necessary infrastructure and recovery capacity, climate disasters exacerbate pre-existing crises by elevating already extreme conditions of food insecurity.
Before the flood, an estimated 32 million people in Nigeria were in acute hunger, a figure equivalent to almost the entire population of Ukraine. In addition to food inflation, the WFP reported over 550,000 hectares (equivalent to over 763,500 association football fields) of cropland were destroyed by the flood in September. To alleviate food insecurity in and around Borno State over the next six months, the UN estimates it will cost over $147 million. It is hard not to wonder how many lives would be saved and how much cheaper food security would be with (more) climate resilient infrastructure. The flood in Borno State is one incident, in one country, and the magnitude of the issue becomes clearer as you see similar crises reverberate across the continent. Before many of these extreme climate events, regions often already lacked the infrastructure to sustainably trade and import food and other necessities, like medical supplies, due to limited road networks.
Healthcare Accessibility
In addition to the climate, economic, and food security implications, a lack of fair-quality, paved roads also increase barriers to healthcare accessibility and puts lives at risk. In one paper, researchers found that of mothers in Ghana who were referred to a hospital by a local organization, more than 70 percent did not go because of inaccessible roads, high transportation costs, and lack of regular transportation. As a result, infant and maternal mortality rates are expected to remain high.
Similarly, a national study in Malawi found that the median travel time to central hospitals was one to two and a half hours. Children in rural Uganda are twice as likely to die from preventable diseases than children in Kampala, as access to healthcare facilities remains an obstacle. So, what does it look like when there are more fair-quality roads? In Kenya, healthcare facilities near fair-quality roads reported higher patient visits and availability of vaccines, critical medication, testing for maternity care, and higher diagnostic accuracy.
Conclusion
The industrial prosperity of the US, EU, and China has come at the expense of the climate. Still, today, Africa’s 54 countries together emit the same amount of carbon as Germany alone. For a continent that contributes least to global emissions and is home to some of the youngest nations in the world—some only 13 to 30 years into their independence—the challenges in designing, building, and funding climate resilient infrastructure, specifically roads, while simultaneously addressing disasters in the economy, food insecurity, and health requires continued and urgent global support.A huge range of development outcomes are contingent on the expansion and resilience of Africa’s roads.
UNECA reports that high-income countries spend 3 to 3.6 percent of GDP on research and development (R&D) of new technologies. The data on R&D in Africa is unavailable, except for Egypt which is estimated to spend just 0.92 percent of GDP on R&D. Africa needs R&D support to deal with its unique climate-resilient infrastructure challenges. This is not an African problem but a responsibility of the global community.
All views expressed in the Welternährung are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the editorial board or of Welthungerhilfe.