The benefits of rural roading

Some months back I wrote about how roading encourages economic development. This month National Geographic has a story on the benefits of rural roads that the author noted in Vietnam back in 1968.

While agricultural extension agents urged farmers in my district to plant the new IR8 rice, engineers were upgrading the rutted, largely impassable farm-to-market road that linked the eight villages. They finished the road through half of the villages.

Everywhere the new road went, farmers began using the new rice with amazing, almost overnight, results.

Farmers could now harvest two crops of IR8 rice per year. Each new crop produced a higher yield than the six-month floating varieties that had been planted for hundreds of years and had provided barely enough grain for subsistence. For the first time, smallholder farmers had a surplus crop and surplus income.

Families could now invest in metal sheeting to improve the roofs on their homes and purchase better clothing and more nutritious food for their children. The children stayed in school longer, thanks to the little "taxis" that carried them from hamlet to hamlet over the new road. Child mortality dropped, as mothers with sick children could get them medical attention early enough for effective intervention.

The most amazing change, however, was the impact that the new upgraded road had on security. Villages once beset by insurgents and underground guerrillas now became safe to travel both day and night. As the new road opened the way for commerce, information, and opportunities, young people no longer were enticed to join political military movements and uprisings.

Where the upgraded road ended, however, so did the planting of IR8. Life in the four villages without the improved road remained mired in poverty and malnutrition, unchanged from decades earlier. Houses were ramshackle, and children were thin, poorly dressed, and not in school. Security remained a constant and even worsening problem.

So the roads helped

1. Increase income
2. Improve housing
3. Clothe children
4. Feed children
5. Educate children
6. Medicate children
7. Increase security

Seems like infrastructure development is more useful than handing aid money to despots to distribute.

Infrastructure aid

The Campaign for Boring Development makes the case that development does not always make for exciting stories. In their words, It doesn't photograph well.

They have 5 principles in their manifesto,

1. Development Does Not Photograph Well
2. “Making the Lives of the Poor Better” is not the same thing as ”Fighting Poverty”
3. Sustainable, but not sustained
4. Development Bloat is the Imperialism of the 21st Century
5. Why Income?

Item 2 is interesting in that they distinguish Humanitarian Aid and Development Aid. The former makes the life of the poor easier but does not grow their wealth (significantly), the latter leads to increased wealth. It seems that some aid is sold as development aid but is in fact humanitarian aid. They give the example of microfinance.

In Banerjee’s analysis, the problem is that the familiar narrative about the bottom billion as entrepreneurial but capital-starved just isn’t borne out by the evidence. Framing the poor as “natural entrepreneurs” obscures the much more mundane reality that, for the most part, very poor people in very poor countries use very small loans very much in the same way middle class people in rich countries use bank loans: to finance big ticket items that massively improve their lives but cost multiples of their monthly income.

If you earn the median U.S. worker’s income, you can’t shell out $20,000 in cash for a nice car next month. That’s six months’ income! It might take you 5 or 6 years to save up that much cash. But that doesn’t mean you have to walk to work every day for the next six years while you save up to buy a car. You get a loan and pay for it while you’re driving it it. Does that loan increase your income and transform your life chances? No. Does it massively improve your quality of life? You betcha.

If you’re in the bottom billion, you can’t shell out $200 in cash to finally fix the damn roof that’s been leaking on you for the last two years. That’s like six months’ income! It might take you 5 or 6 years to save up that much cash. But that doesn’t mean that you have to keep getting rained on for six years while you save up for your roof. You get a loan and pay for it while you’re using it. Does that loan increase your income and transform your life chances? No. Does it massively improve your quality of life? You betcha.

Source

They are not critical of helping the poor in their poverty, but they wish to distinguish this from lifting them out of poverty. Now any endeavour may have aspects of both, but development probably needs to be predominant for it to be called Development Aid.

The main reason to link to this story is that I find the topics they discuss anything but boring. Developing infrastructure such as water supply and roading is very important; possibly under-appreciated (at least roading), and

Road building is hard, dusty, unglamorous work. It photographs horribly. I mean, seriously, try hitting up donors with that image. It just doesn’t work.

Road Building, in other words, is the original Boring Development agenda: the
stuff development agencies used to do back in a halcyon age back before the bloat agenda hobbled pragmatic interventions proven to work.

While donors dither, African governments – who need little reminding how important roads are to development – are taking the lead. Africa is on a road-building frenzy to expand its existing, woefully inadequate primary road network tenfold by 2040.

New Zealand needs more roads and it is a high-income developed country; how much more does Africa.

Africa for Norway

 

Africa raising funds for Norwegians. Length 3:45.

Source.