Roads: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Development
Artwork by Elie Hatungimana, Stand With Me, 2023.
Editor’s note: It’s been a while between articles here at The GPI so thanks for bearing with us! We have been busy welcoming our latest Sustainable Growth Fellows and we’ll be posting more about them shortly. But hopefully normal service will now be resumed.
Ashura Amini knew she was in trouble. She had already miscarried once and when the bleeding started, she feared the worst. The nearest clinic was a two-hour motorbike ride away and the nearest hospital a further day’s travel in the old, cramped, shared minivan that passed for public transport. She grabbed a few essentials and headed for the clinic. Unfortunately, she needed more care than they could provide so she continued onwards to the hospital. Less than halfway through the journey she knew she had miscarried again. With an almost unimaginable stoicism, Ashura spent another seven hours on the bus until she reached the hospital in town. By the time she arrived, there was, predictably, nothing they could do. Ashura spent three days in town at her sister’s house before she returned to her village.
This took place in 2021. Ashura lived then and continues to live now in a remote village in Western Tanzania. The village is in the foothills of the Mahale Mountains National Park and is stunningly beautiful. Untouched forest rises from the shores of Lake Tanganyika and stretches unbroken for several hundred square kilometres. It is one of just two or three places on earth where chimpanzees and lions coexist. But the lack of even a good dirt road to her village of several hundred people made the journey to the hospital long, slow, uncomfortable, and ultimately heartbreaking. The town hospital is just over 200km away so the journey should not have taken anything like such a long time. Fortunately, in 2022, a new all-weather road was built to Ashura’s village.
The Good
This road cut the journey to the hospital to just four hours. Whilst it’s impossible to know if a four-hour journey would have averted Ashura’s miscarriage, many other more commonplace activities have been greatly improved. The new road has opened opportunities for commerce, education, and of course health care. This is the reliable Good of roads and development; they transform remote lives like few other things. When Ethiopia upgraded its rural road network between 2012 and 2016, household consumption increased by 16% (with higher gains in more remote areas). In Nigeria in the mid-2000s, a 10% reduction in transport costs increased local GDP by 5.4% and cut poverty by 2.6%. The pattern is consistent across Africa: better roads mean real gains in income and health outcomes.
It’s not hard to see how this works. Roads lower the transaction costs that strangle rural economies. Tanzanian farmers who lack road access face input prices 40-55% higher than their connected compatriots meaning they rarely farm more than for subsistence. Other researchers have found that a 10% reduction in travel time to market increases crop production 23%. Roads open markets, enable women to work outside the home, get children to school, and give families a way out of subsistence farming. They are, quite simply, the path along which rural poverty recedes.
The new road means a lot to the people of Ashura’s village. But, according to a village elder it also means ‘that’s the end of the forest’.
The Bad
If roads bring commerce, education, and health care, they also reliably bring deforestation. Nearly 30% of all tropical forest loss between 2001 and 2020 occurred less than one kilometre from a road. Smaller secondary roads like the one to Ashura’s village are bigger deforestation vectors than primary roads. In the tropical forests of the Congo Basin, secondary roads cause more damage than primary roads. Again, the mechanism is clear; the same road that carries a farmer and her goods to the market opens the forest to the chainsaw and in turn carries the timber to buyers.
Protected areas provide at best, some limited protection from this process. Researchers document expansion into parks, illegal logging, increased poaching of high-value species, and escalating conflict between humans and wildlife in road-adjacent zones. The calculus is brutal it’s a bare faced trade-off; a village gains a market connection worth hundreds of dollars per household per year; a forest loses centuries of carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and the ecosystem services that regulate rainfall and prevent catastrophic erosion. For Tanzania’s Mahale Mountains, where Ashura’s harrowing story began, the new road brought hope. But the same route that cut hospital journeys has also opened a corridor which now endangers the wildlife and forest that surround her home.
The double-edge sword of trading human development for environmental damage at least comes with real positive outcomes for the world’s poorest people. But the concluding component of this tarmac triptych is just irredeemably bad. African roads are shockingly deadly.
The Ugly
Prepare for a barrage of depressing statistics. Africa is home to 20% of global road deaths but only 3% of its road vehicles. Between 2010 and 2021 Africa’s road deaths increased by 17% whilst globally deaths fell by 5%. 300,000 people die on African roads every year; that’s the entire population of Cardiff or Reykjavik wiped out. Every. Single. Year. In reality, those cities thankfully only have five or six people die each year. Combined. Not a single African country has laws meeting best-practice standards for the five key road safety behavioural risk factors: speeding, drink driving, helmet use, seatbelts, and child restraints. But laws on the books will only help if enforcement is consistent enough to change norms.
The roads that move people and goods (legally or illicitly) and help people work their way out of poverty are also a public health catastrophe.
Roads are the poster child for the trade-offs inherent in the developing world. It is abhorrent to think we should accept what happened to Ashura as just part of the how the world is. But helping her and those in similar situations will come at a cost to our shared natural world. Road deaths are declining globally due to the hundreds of minor systematic improvements made over the last 80 years of mass road travel; road-building standards, ambulance services, reflective signage, blood banks, working traffic lights. Up-front money aside, building roads is easy and a precondition of ending poverty. But building the ‘soft’ systems around the ‘hard’ infrastructure that are needed to protect the nature and increasingly, the road users themselves is much harder. Let’s hope it doesn’t take 80 years.