Many countries have recently gone through a process of transforming theirforce account or direct labour road maintenance operations to a private sector contracting environment. To assist in preparing guidelines on how best to perform this process, case studies were carried out in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. At the time these countries undertookthe transformation, the process was new, and a sharp learning curve oftenmeant that insufficient attention was paid to the human resource implications in both the public and private sectors. In a number of cases public sector employees were left idle whilst the private sector was expected to take up the reigns with only a few trained and qualified staff. The lessonslearnt from these cases can be used by other countries embarking upon this transformation to avoid similar problems. A systematic approach is recommended that includes the stages of: situation analysis; planning / preparation; phasing out force account and phasing in contracting as a joined up activity; and monitoring / evaluation of the program. Every country considering change has different characteristics and this paper presents a rangeof options to be chosen depending on circumstances. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Abstract