When a road is improved, it does more than make the journey smoother and swifter. Other things also happen.

Always.

Because roads are the bloodstream of the way we live. To settle anywhere, we require a road to bring in the supplies we need and ship out the produce we grow.

This imperative is so strong that we don’t establish towns and then build roads to and from and between them.

We build roads first, and towns then grow along their route.

First, roads and railways have small camps and depots for their own construction. Travellers use the camps as staging posts, people in nearby homesteads gravitate to the new facilities for supplies, for transport systems and for social interaction; business then moves in to exploit the opportunities this activity generates.

So roads create population centres in the first instance, and then service them thereafter. If the road is good, it will service the centre well and the town is likely to thrive and grow. If the road is bad, or is allowed to decay, development will be slower and weaker.

This reminds us that the current spate of road improvements in Kenya will not only enhance travel and transport, but will act as development generators and pipelines for more activity on or near their routes.

For example, the hugely improved road from Isiolo to Moyale will boost the economy of connection and transport not only of those two towns and places like Laisamis and Marsabit which already exist between them, but potentially revolutionise the lives of everybody along the entire length of the road and for many miles either side.

This will create and sustain substantive towns where before there were a few shacks. Indeed, every stretch of road that gets well built and surfaced will unleash opportunity and potential.

This applies to very localised improvements (like the dualling of peri-urban streets) and to longer trunk roads (like Isiolo-Moyale). And the implications can get even bigger when good roads cross national borders. And bigger still when those roads are part of a continental network that crosses all borders.

Several of the largest road improvement projects in Kenya right now are part of the Trans Africa Highway system.

Nairobi is at the crossroads of both the Cape Town to Cairo and the Mombasa to Lagos routes — two of nine designated international highways that are not only planned to criss-cross the continent, but are now almost completely built!

Be in no doubt, they will make other things happen through an unprecedented ease and increase of traffic between many more countries and a veritable explosion of opportunities for everybody along all their routes.

The opportunities and rewards will be greatest for those who have the best plans to exploit the potential, and who have thought carefully and prepared well to avoid the problems.

If we want a business boom instead of a business bang, we need to be thinking, planning and acting on this monumental change … right now.

 

 

Source: http://www.nation.co.ke