The paper describes the maintenance initiatives being developed and implemented within the Ministry of Transport in Vietnam, through support from the RT2 project. In particular it describes how the project is supporting the MOT to take its first steps towards developing a 'maintenance culture' in the rural road sector, how the sustainability issues of the project initiatives are being addressed, how effective the interventions are and what lessons have been learned. The RT2 project is a joint World Bank / DFID funded project which covers 40 out of the national total of 61 provinces. By the end of the project in September 2005 it is estimated that approximately 10,000 km of rural roads will have been rehabilitated. While the rehabilitation component is limited to these 40 project provinces, all of the initiatives under the maintenance component are to be introduced nationwide, or have the ability to go nationwide should the MOT decide to do so in the future. The overall approach and strategy for improving the maintenance of rural roads was developed in partnership with the MOT and PDOTs. The core of the strategy is to attack the maintenance problem from two directions simultaneously - 'Top down' support for the MOT, and 'bottom up' support to the provinces. In both cases the emphasis is on building ownership of the initiatives, with each of these being a direct response to an expressed need. The overall strategy for assessing maintenance opportunities is to disaggregate rural road maintenance into its constituent parts and link these to the existing capacity of institutions responsible for maintenance. The strategy for maintenance initiatives was developed in acknowledgement of the need not only for capacity building of authorities responsible for maintenance, but also of the need to reduce the maintenance burden of rural roads on local communities and local authorities who have limited resources available to them. At present, the project support is 'supply driven', in accordance with project initiatives towards set objectives, such as maintenance handbooks, improved road inventory and condition survey processes etc. As the province and MOT engagement progresses, the support will become more 'demand driven', with support being structured around each project partner's expressed needs. The effectiveness of the maintenance initiatives is reviewed annually through a monitoring and evaluation system, based around the project Logframe indicators. The project initiatives aimed at improving the systems and capacity to manage maintenance will not necessarily mean that full maintenance will be carried out, as this is unlikely to happen until the policy and funding strategy has been agreed and implemented. However, routine maintenance is and will be implemented at least on RT2 roads, and potentially on the whole rural road network as a direct result of the project interventions. The project initiatives have been effective in raising the profile of rural road maintenance, putting maintenance on the policy agenda and raising awareness of maintenance issues of local communities as well as central and local authorities responsible for managing rural roads. The key lessons learned are based on specific principles that have proved successful in the implementation of RT2, and more general principles that have emerged and been tried and tested by RT2. The effects of RT2 maintenance initiatives are already being observed and the momentum is increasing rapidly. The level of ownership of the MOT for this component is high. All the maintenance initiatives have been introduced in such a way as to ensure they result in sustainable impact on the management of the rural road network, and many of the lessons learned from RT2 are being fed into the RT3 design. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Samenvatting