Abstract
Motorcycle transportation has burgeoned in war-affected West Africa over the past decade. The penetration of motorcycle taxis deep into isolated rural communities has spread spontaneously and created direct and indirect employment opportunities for low-skilled youth, a category most susceptible to militia recruitment. Equally important, it has significantly contributed to lifting smallholder farmers out of poverty by reducing the costs of moving produce to markets, with motorcycles able to visit villages connected to feeder roads solely by footpaths. Nevertheless, state actors and international donors remain reluctant to allocate funds to rural track building/upgrading, preferring to stick to more conventional, but expensive, construction/rehabilitation of rural roads accessible to four-wheeled vehicles. Through a case study of Liberia – still recovering from two civil wars and an Ebola health crisis – this paper argues that the impact of bringing community access through track construction/footpath upgrading is significant, particularly because track construction lends itself par excellence to the involvement of the rural communities themselves.
Highlights
Proceedings of the Institution of Civil EngineersPublished with permission by the ICE under the CC-BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Motorcycle transportation has burgeoned in war-affected West Africa over the past decade
Through a case study of Liberia – still recovering from two civil wars and an Ebola health crisis – this paper argues that the impact of bringing community access through track construction/footpath upgrading is significant, because track construction lends itself par excellence to the involvement of the rural communities themselves
Summary
Published with permission by the ICE under the CC-BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Connecting isolated communities to the road network reduces the cost of inputs and transport to markets, increases farmers’ access to larger markets, facilitates trade flows and spurs value addition and crowd-in investments (African Monitor, 2012) Combined, these factors will give subsistence and smallholder agriculture a much-needed boost in productivity and allow subsistence farmers and isolated rural communities to start participating in the cash economy. A somewhat dated though insightful 1982 World Bank cross-sectional study of villages in the Ashanti region of Ghana, which aimed to determine how agricultural practices, costs and prices varied with accessibility within the region, found that connecting a village to a road head by converting a footpath to a vehicle track was calculated to have a gross beneficial effect of the order of a hundred times greater than improving the same distance of earth track to a good gravel road (Hine and Riverson, 1982).
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