Rural Transport and Regional Development

Poor Transport Conditions are a substantial constraint on the increase of agricultural production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Conventional rural transport projects, which focus exclusively on motorised transport can only partly remove these restrictions. Therefore the International Labour Office conducted a pilot Integrated Rural Transport Project in Tanzania. Footpaths, tracks and roads were improved, Intermediate Means of Transport (IMT) promoted and transport avoiding measures implemented. For the first time the economic benefits of appropriate transport improvements could be assessed on the household level. This thesis proves that non-motorised transport interventions had the same magnitude of impacts as projects in the motorised sector.
The experience from the project was used to establish an econometric model with a system dynamics approach. The model tries to simulate the development path of an initially isolated region under different transport conditions. In the last chapter the implications of the new rural transport approach on transport appraisal methodologies are discussed.