The 5th Joint Transport Sector Review is being held at a time when the District, Urban and Community Access Roads (DUCAR) sub-sector is experiencing policy changes, some of which have far reaching effects on the way services is in the subsector will be delivered by respective local governments in future.
Since the last Joint Transport Sector Review, activities planned to meet the objectives and targets of the RSDP2 have been undertaken with varying results. Modest achievements have been registered. There are, however still many chal-lenges emerging, several of which are a carry-over from the past years and others are new.
The country’s road network is categorized into National, District, Urban and Community Access roads. The National roads network currently totals 21,000km; District Roads 22,500km; Urban Roads 35,000km. National Roads refer to the road network connecting Districts with one another and Uganda to the neighboring countries. They are managed by the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA).
District roads link communities and the countryside to major trading centers and the National Roads network. The responsibility for District roads lies with the District Local Governments.Urban roads are roads of varying types (bitumen, gravel or earth) within the boundaries of Town Councils. They fall under the mandate of Urban Local Governments.
Community Access Roads are the small link roads providing access to primary schools, community centers and connect villages to one another and to District roads. This category of roads is the responsibility of the Local Council III (Sub
county) Governments.
The role of the Ministry of Works and Transport (MoWT) in respect to District, Urban and Community Access Roads (DUCAR) is to provide the following:a) Macro planning, coordination, monitoring, guidance and setting policy and standards for their rehabilitation and maintenance;b) Provide liaison for Donor-funded programmes in the sub-sector;c) Assist the districts in procurement and maintenance of their road maintenance plant and equipment; and) Organizing training programmes and capacity building technical, administrative and finance personnel and sensitization of policy makers with respect to District, Urban and Community Access Roads maintenance.
Since 2004, the country’s road network has been undergoing a review to assess its functionality and effectiveness. During this review, it was found that some critical links in the District road network needed to be upgraded to improve the effectiveness of the National Roads Network.
In this year, 10,000km of such roads (of which 6,500km were formally maintained by District Local Governments), were upgraded to the category of National roads and will be maintained by the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA).The big challenge is that the budget of UNRA seems not to have been increased proportionately to take into account the new demand.
Following the upgrading of some of the District roads to the National Roads Network, there is now a growing pressure to look into the Community Access Roads network to identify the links that serve the function of District roads which will have to be upgraded to the District roads category.An overview of performance of programmes for district, urban community access roads is summarized in Table 1.
Bridges
Since FY 2004/05, Government has put more emphasis on construction of bridges on community access roads (or across large rivers or swamps where no roads exist) to link up separated communities.
The bridges when completed have brought about tremendous improvement in accessibility to the communities in the hitherto remote and inaccessible villages. However, the demand for such bridges continues to be very high. It would require construction of at least 12 bridges every year in order to cope with the demand.
Financial Performance
Table 2 shows the financial performance for district, urban and community access programmes.
Future Plans
The clearing of the district roads rehabilitation backlog, the sealing/construction of a critical length of urban roads to bitumen standard and resumption of rehabilitation of community access roads countrywide will be the top priorities in the Short and Medium Term plan.
It is planned that the district roads rehabilitation backlog of 10,000km be cleared in a period of five years. It is also planned that for sustainable maintenance of the roads, the regravelling/spot improvement output be raised from the current average of 1050km per year to 4000km. Similarly for urban roads, the annual output will have to be raised from the current very low level to 250km of resealing/construction to bitumen standard per year. The planned outputs and projected budgets in the Short to Medium Term are show in Table 3 above.
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