Project Selection

Rural accessibility planning - Tanzania

Accessibility is a key problem in rural areas and good rural planning needs to address access to a full range of goods and services required by the rural population. Unfortunately, off-the shelf rural planning methodologies appear inappropriate to local level planning for rural Africa and are primarily designed for state level ‘top-down’ planning.

The two pronged process starts with village level work to quantify time and frequency for assess to key services like health; education; water supply; access to credit; access to district level governance; problems of agriculture access; employment and access to markets. In parallel, each village provides local based views of the problems of each element and also to rank their views regarding interventions in different sectors.

The process is transparent and the outputs are kept simple and easily understandable at village, ward and district level. The process provides a ‘user based’ compliment to the associated ‘engineering’ based planning process using core road identification and local rapid Condition Surveys. The process is reiterative, returning to villages to check if initial analysis correctly reflects local understanding and is designed to provide clear input of village views to district level planning workshop which will determine the allocation of resources.

Representative Results

Meetings to collect data completed for all villages and ward in Kongwa district.
Problem and priority matrices developed with verification meetings at ward level.
Local priorities related to data provided upon all aspects of rural accessibility.
Local planning follow up planned to understand the extent to which access can address priorities.
Realistic linkages to programmes of water supply, health, education; agriculture, markets, SME development and Savings and credit to be developed.
Open availability of information developed for district planning with increased ocal awareness based upon interventions planned with district and ward politicians and populations.
Potential for ‘Beyond road’ activities investigated.

Important Findings

Direct local level involvement is able to quantify the extent of areas with problems and lead to district level demonstration for basic priorities.
Transparent problem definition base is provided to local village and ward government.
Quantified basis for wider aspects of accessibility information to be presented to local decision makers.
A direct process makes it possible to relate perceived accessibility problems to actual local views for means to address their poverty and use the compounding of these to provide for focussed poverty reduction measures.