Major Kiribati road upgrade close to completion

Transcript

Major roadwork to upgrade and repair the main South Tarawa road network in Kiribati is in the final stages of completion.

The 33 kilometre road stretches from the Betio business district in the west to the airport at Bonriki in the East with eight kilometres of feeder roads, numerous tidal barriers as well as speed humps thrown in to make the roads safer.

Cost for the road comes in at US$57.5 million dollars, the majority of funding coming from the World Bank.

The World Bank's country director for the Pacific, Franz Drees-Gross is in Kiribati this week for the soft-launch of the road rehabilitation project.

He told Koroi Hawkins on a patchy line from South Tarawa that the road network is the single largest public infrastructure project ever undertaken by Kiribati and represents 30 percent of its GDP.

FRANZ DREES-GROSS: Tarawa is one of the most densely populated spots on the map 58,000 people living on a very thin stretch of land (..inaudible-section..) average about 450 metres wide and about 33 kilometres in length. So it is a very densely populated area bisected by a single road that goes all the way from Betio on one end in the West to the airport in Bonriki on the other-side. So as you are aware in addition to the road itself there was a lot of coastal defences that had to be strengthened to make sure that the road had to be safe from erosion effects from the sea. Also the type of pavement that was used is particularly resilient to heavy rainfall and as you know with climate change we expect it to be stronger peak rain events as well as prolonged drought. So it is a road that from its pavement structure should be more resilient to heavy rains and has much better drainage than the previous road.

KOROI HAWKINS: And 2009 you said from the concept development of this idea, such a long time. Is this due to the remoteness of Kiribati and the difficulty of the logistics and all that?

FDG: Well I think the early discussions were 2009 we actually approved funding on March first in 2011. And so there was the initial design period but then you know final designs took a long time because a lot of community consultation for example on locating things that didn't exist previously. You know in such a densely populated place would you locate bus stops so that it is community friendly. There are places where you needed to widen the roads their have to be long discussions with the community about keeping land for a public project like this. And then at one point basically the works came in much more expensive than all of us expected. So there were no cost comparators I mean you couldn't use unit prices what roads cost, similar roads cost in other places. But in the end none of those really captured the remoteness of getting equipment, aggregate, asphalt technical staff to Kiribati. So at some point we did need additional funding just to get the works completed and Australia chipped in additional funding IDA from the World Bank chipped in additional funding so all of this, the technical difficulties the consultations with the community sort of the unknowns of managing prices in an empty environment like this made this a much longer and more difficult project.

KH: Going around the communities for the soft launch and that what have you heard from community leaders, from chiefs, from people who would be using these roads?

FDG: Look it is just a very initial impression but I do sense the message it sends about investing in Kiribati's future. The capacity of the government I think, in government circles but the pride of having pulled such a big piece of infrastructure off. I mean mind you all of the engineering consultancy services designed the road, the contractor, the engineering supervision, were all contracted by the government with support from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank but it was the government that did the contracting. So just pulling this off you can see there is a sense of pride both inside the government and I think in the communities too that suddenly there is such a nice and at this point quite gleaming piece of infrastructure that is really just adding value to the communities.

KH:  In time do you see this road being maintained into the future given the nature of Kiribati and the adverse weather we have seen in this country over the years?  

FDG: That was a big point of discussion it also contributed to the long time it took actually to bring everything about. So there is a system in place for the maintenance of the road which basically two of the local sub-contractors that were used by MacDonald Dowell the main contractor for the road as part of the construction. They are going to remain on during the defect liability and be doing road maintenance on a performance based contractual basis. After that if the government is happy with the performance of those local companies, they can keep them on beyond the defects liability period to maintain the roads for years after that if they choose. But we are trying to basically, with such an important piece of infrastructure also put in place sort of a new and innovative way of road maintenance that involves the local private sector and not just the department of public works.