Road Rehabilitation Project, Second Road Rehabilitation Project, and Third Road Rehabilitation Project [Loans

The institutional and policy reforms envisaged in the projects were complex and far-reaching and needed a longer time to come to fruition. There was no sharp focus on road asset management, which was a theme common to the three projects. Each of the projects left an unfinished agenda, which suggests that TA was spread too thinly over too many reform issues. The designs of succeeding projects did not indicate or act on the fact that some reform measures in the precursor projects were pending, at risk, and in need of ADB’s continued attention. The conclusions that must be drawn from this assessment are twofold: (i) the implementation time for institutional reforms typically exceeds the implementation period of an average civil works project. The reforms should therefore be pursued over a longer period and (ii) long-term planning and proper sequencing of the reform process are needed to successfully reform the road sector. Sufficient resources need to be allocated for capacity building of institutions and monitoring of the implementation of reforms. Given the common resource constraints, this would mean being more selective in determining priority areas for policy and institutional reforms.