The Roadsip programme and its use of communication tools in its implementation

Abstract

Most economies now rely heavily on road transport for passenger and goods movement. However, roads in many parts of the world are poorly managed and badly maintained, usually by bureaucratic government departments.) In Africa which is a developing continent 60 to 80 percent of all passenger and freight transport moves by road and roads provide the main form of access to most rural; communities. (Heggie and Vickers 1998). Zambia is a landlocked country and as such roads play a major role in the development of each and every sector of its economy. However, by the early 9Q's only about 20 percent of Zambia's road network was in good condition. In the early 90's, countries got together and tried to improve the road situation in their countries. From this effort, two major initiatives were launched to better understand the underlying causes of the poor road maintenance policies and to explore ways of establishing a secure and stable flow of funds for road maintenance. These are PROVIAL in Latin America and RMI in Africa. These programmes have discovered and explained why roads are poorly managed and under financed. Countries can now draw working conclusions about the most effective ways to promote sound policies for managing and financing road networks. In Zambia, the response has been the establishment of a road fund and the NRB to administer the fund and implement the ROADSIP programme. The ROADSIP programme is a ten-year programme designed to improve road management by trying to commercialise the road sector through introducing a fund comprised of road user fees and handling day-to-day management of this fund through a small secretariat subject to explicit legal regulations and technical and financial audits. This report tries to explore the performance of the ROADSIP programme in its quest to improve road management in the country. The report examines the communication strategies of the programme and tries to suggest and recommend that better communication strategies can greatly enhance the programmes success.