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.
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.”
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.
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 .
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.
A Guest Editorial