INFRASTRUCTURE

Rukwa is one of the remotest regions in the country, far from Dar es Salaam the commercial centre and from Dodoma the administrative capital. The infrastructure in the region is below standards and is an impediment to growth of the region

. Transport

Transport is an important sector in the whole process of development and poverty alleviation. Its effectiveness, appropriateness and adequacy contribute a lot to the successful implementation of socioeconomic activities. The impact of having such a transport system is lowering of domestic production cost through timely delivery, enhancing economies of scale in the production process and creating economic opportunities. The economic opportunities include ease of market access; strengthening of competition; promotion of trade, tourism and foreign investment; contribution to government revenue and generation of a large number of employment opportunities

There are four transport modes serving Rukwa region: i) roads, ii) railways iii) marine, and iv) air. The transport system has failed to meet the demand of the region and has contributed a lot to slow development of the region.

Road Transport

Road transport is the most used mode and accounts for more than 90% of goods and passenger transport in the region.The region has a network of 4,540.kms of roads of different classes as shown in Table 20.

Table 20 - Road classes and lengths per district (km)

Table 21 shows the road density in each district. Sumbawanga Municipalty has the highest road density while Mpanda district has the lowest.

Table 21 - Road density in the various districts:

Out of the total road network of 4,719km, only 8.5km are paved and 320 km graveled. The rest are earth roads. By April 2007, almost the whole network was in bad to poor condition. This is a result of the abnormally continuous rains which started in October 2006 and stopped around mid March 2007. Passenger Service Vehicles (PSVs) stopped operating along the Sumbawanga – Mpanda, Sumbawanga – Kasesya/Kasanga and Chala – Namanyere – Kirando roads around December 2006. The authority responsible for trunk roads, TANROADS, was forced to limit the weight of vehicles plying on some of the trunk roads to 10 Tons GVM to stop further deterioration of the roads. This caused significant inconvenience to travelers and the only vehicles which managed to transport people were 4WD pick-up trucks which charged three times the fare that PSVs were charging.

All the trunk roads, with exception of the section from Inyonga to Tabora border, are said to be un-seasonal. Most of the regional roads are also un-seasonal except for the road from Muze to sitalike which is seasonal due to lack of bridges at river crossings. Many of the district and feeder road are seasonal.

The other notable road transport problem is lack of direct connectivity between villages/important centers located along the Lake Tanganyika shores namely Karema, Kabwe, Kirando and Kipili. At the moment, one has to travel via the Sumbawanga – Mpanda trunk road to reach the other village. ..

The source of funds for maintenance of the roads is the Road Fund. The Table 22 shows the trend of funds received by TANROADS and LGAs from the Road Fund and other sources for maintenance of the roads during the last three years.

Table 22 -Funds received by road authorities for maintenance of roads (2004/05 – 2006/07)

Funds that have been spent on roads development programmes in the past three years are seen in the Table 23

Table 23 - Funds spent for road development works (2004/05 – 2006/07)

A programme to improve the condition of roads in the region includes paving of sections of trunk roads and rehabilitation of a number of trunk and regional roads. The timetable for these improvements is shown on the Table 24 below:

Table 24 – Roads to be improved in the near future

Other on-going activities related to roads are i) detailed engineering design for upgrading of the Sumbawanga – Mpanda road (235 km) to paved standards and ii) feasibility study and preliminary design for upgrading to paved standards of the roads from Sumbawanga to Kasesya and Matai to Kasanga all with a total of 151 km.

The region considers the Sumbawanga to Kasesya and Matai to Kasanga roads as more important as they connect the region to the main markets of its agricultural produce, Zambia and the DRC.