By Muluken Yewondwossen
Addis Ababa City Roads Authority (AACRA) receives its highest funding injection ever from the Road Fund for the maintenance of roads this budget year. The Road Fund targets to boost funding courtesy of higher resource mobilization of over 250 percent, in contrast to the preceding budget year.
As Moges Tibebe, Director General of AACRA disclosed to Capital, for the current budget year, the metropolitan authority has secured close to a billion birr from the Road Fund.
“This year’s allocation has shown significant progress and increment to reach 960 million birr which is a record high compared to the 495 million in the past budget year,” he cited.
In the past couple of years the fund secured for road maintenance from the Road Fund has shown visible increment. For instance, last year’s allocation was 495 million birr which was an increase of 291 percent in contrast to a 170 million birr funding for the 2021/22 budget year.
This year’s allocation has also seen a rise of 194percent compared to the 2022/23 budget year amount.
“Despite the resource secured from the fund showing significant increment every year, it is yet to be fully sufficient since the demand is very high,” Moges described the gaps, adding, “As per our evaluation, 400 km of road infrastructure in the city still needs maintenance.”
As a roads authority, AACRA conducts routine maintenance every year with periodic maintenances also conducted every five to seven years.
There are also rehabilitation and overlay projects for roads with the lifespan of eight to 10 years, “However, we are not working on that because of limited resource allocated for maintenance.”
Most of the roads in the capital are over aged. As a result, every time we carry out priority road conditions survey and based on the data, we plan for the rehabilitation project of roads at different sets of priority,” the Director General highlighted.
As the survey indicates, over 300km asphalt roads need rehabilitation work, but in the budget year AACRA will only be able to maintain 102km of asphalt road.
According to Moges, for other road infrastructures, 800 km of maintenance will be conducted in the budget year.
In the 2022/23 budget year, AACRA had carried out 1,014 km road projects, inclusive of maintenance.
Currently, AACRA has 528 projects out of which 54 are asphalt road projects.
Road sector development is one of the priorities for Addis Ababa City Administration. From the total 140 billion birr approved budget for 2023/24 budget year, AACRA secured 11.6 billion birr or almost 8.3 percent of the total budget.
As Moges explained, in the past five years, 82 asphalt road projects have been accomplished, which indicated that the city administration gave sensible attention to the sector development.
In the coming ten years, AACRA needs USD 9.5 billion for road sector development that is also use alternative to meet with the demand through different initiatives including public private partnership.
Road Fund which is under the Ethiopian Roads Administration (ERA) as a directorate which started in February 2022 in order to mobilize funds mainly from the levy imposed on fuel and lubricants and other sources and penalties on the aim to support the road sector rehabilitation.
The information that Capital obtained from ERA indicated that in the 2023/24 budget year, the Road Fund has targeted to mobilize 18.5 billion birr, which is up 250 percent compared to the 7.4 billion birr achieved in the 2022/23 budget year.
Increment in tariffs and improvement in some operations has been underlined as a reason for this huge resource mobilization plan.