Monday, November 06, 2006

The Rural Access Index – Does it capture enough?

At a recent IFRTD meeting in Tanzania, participants reflected on the various transport performance indicators under development. Of particular interest was the Rural Access Index, one of the most established headline indicators. The view was expressed that it’s current definition: % of population within 2kms of an all weather road is not sufficiently oriented to livelihood outcomes.

Distance to an all weather road on its own does not sufficiently capture the complexities of rural access which include availability, affordability and reliability of transport services. It was questioned whether the computation of the index should incorporate time in addition to distance.

What do you think? The IFRTD would like to hear your views. Share your comments below or email the IFRTD Secretariat at ifrtd@ifrtd.org

We will share all the views we receive with the network and feed them into the ongoing World Bank Transport Results Measurement programme.

6 comments:

Priyanthi Fernando said...

Surely the question of whether an indicator captures enough, must be accompanied by knowledge of what it's being used for and by whom.

The need to have indicators that enable international comparisons is different from the need to have indicators for local or national level decision making.

So to answer a very complicated question rather simply, I would say that yes, time should be incorporated into the indicator of rural access.

But I would caution the use of this indicator for the purposes of local level decision making, since it fails to capture many other dimensions of rural access, including the gender dimension.

Alberto Lazaro said...

I work with on the rainforest of Peru and some times in Brazil, one of the more critical and difficult points to arise is transportation. Distance is important but also time.
Time is important to resolve the following issues: cost and capacity to make best offers for business.
People who need to walk several days to carry food and any kind of material to survive in the middle of the forest, in this case the prices increases many times in 200%, because many of those material are carried on the back of the people.
The product of the harvest such as banana, cacao, coffee many times does not received good prices because many times arrived in bad conditions at the commercial places.

Alberto Lazaro said...

I work with on the rainforest of Peru and some times in Brazil, one of the more critical and difficult points to arise is transportation. Distance is important but also time.
Time is important to resolve the following issues: cost and capacity to make best offers for business.
People who need to walk several days to carry food and any kind of material to survive in the middle of the forest, in this case the prices increases many times in 200%, because many of those material are carried on the back of the people.
The product of the harvest such as banana, cacao, coffee many times does not received good prices because many times arrived in bad conditions at the commercial places.

Martin said...

If a general approach to the definition of "livelihood outcomes" is adopted, then the current basis of the indicator excludes all those who rely on water transport as a means of executing their livelihood strategies. So I would say that irrespective of whether or not it is sufficiently oriented to livelihood outcomes, per se it does not capture the complexities of rural access.
regards
Martin Fox

Mark Harvey said...

Time spent travelling to the definitive all weather road is surely a better measure of effort than distance as it will capture different terrains, challenges and obstacles - the degree of difficulty of access. If one wants to relate an indicator to livelihood outcomes then the indicator may become quite complex in capturing aspects of livelihoods - perhaps basing it around the livelihood assets or outcomes pentagon (social, financial, human, physical, personal). Ived Amos comment makes sense - depends upon who uses the indicator. I think a simple switch from (or addition to) a distance-based to time-based indicator would be a good first step. A next step would be to capture non-road "destinations" (eg access to river or lake transport). But it depends upon what we want to measure - the proximity of transport services (presumably enabled by gov't and provided by private sector) or some measure of the extent to which govt's are providing appropriate infrastructure (govt's build roads but not many rivers!). Complex, fascinating and very important - I wish you luck.

Simon Done said...

It is good that the index is uncomplicated. It is so easy to think of one extra variable to add, then another and so on until the result is unwieldy and no more accurate.

Does a low index imply that rural people are well connected or that rapid urbanisation has occurred and no one is left in the rural areas? Might it not be better if it were the rural population that is used to derive the percentage?

Defining a road as all weather is not at all easy. All weather to a 4WD may not be all weather to a bus. Could the index refer to all weather in a typical rural vehicle accessible to all?

Time is probably more realistic than distance. One can imagine narrow Nepalese valleys that take hours to cross.

It is possible that no transport services use the all weather road, or that they are very expensive, or that there are no facilities at the end, or that they are very far away. If people are using the all weather road to go somewhere, could the index refer to the time taken to actually get the far end, their destination? The road is the means, not the end. Reaching a road is not sufficient.