Roads funding priority index for Sub-Saharan Africa using principal components analysis

Abstract

This article presents a new Road Funding Priority Index (RFPI) that simultaneously considers the technical, economic, social and environmental dimensions in order to assist decision makers in their selective processes of high-priority road construction and preservation projects. The RFPI is a decision support tool that was tested on 50 road projects, including 25 unpaved road construction projects and 25 paved road preservation projects. The stages of development of the RFPI are the following: the establishment of a theoretical framework (1), the selection of the relevant indicators (2), the transformation of indicators (3), the normalization of indicators (4), the correlation and significance test (5), the weighting using the principal component analysis (PCA) (6); and the aggregation and calculation of the RFPI (7). Ten (10) high-priority road projects were selected based on their respective RFPI values. Amongst them, 60% are preservation projects and 40% are construction projects, which depicts evidence of the importance of maintaining existing roads, but also the need to construct new ones, as long as they have an RFPI close to 100. The budget of the realization of the high-priority projects was estimated at 57.7 million US dollars. These conclusions prove that the RFPI is a useful tool for improving, in a rigorous scientific method, the process of prioritizing road infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.