ENHANCEMENT OF COMMUNITY INITIATIVES FOR BUILDING SMALL ROAD BRIDGES IN RURAL AREA OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Abstract

 In rural area of developing countries, river crossing with no bridges hamper people access to social services, especially in rainy seasons. In this paper, an international technical cooperation approach is presented for enhancing community initiatives for building and maintaining small road bridges by themselves through designing bridges and providing material and technical transfer to the communities for constructions. Under the circumstances where the hydrological data and geoengineering information at the sites were limited and mechanical properties of available construction material were not statistically standardized, with reasonable assumptions, the bridges were designed and constructed. Quality control of the construction done through community initiatives were not equivalent to the cases where contractors were engaged. It was difficult to quantify performance of the constructed bridges through community initiatives. It was also necessary to build consensus on the proposal of feasible and economical design of the bridges considering socioeconomic impact among the local communities who normally expected internationally high standard services to the NGOs. Several bridges were constructed by the communities with support from the NGOs that the authors were established. After four to seven years have passed, they have been serving reasonable access to local communities without causing any human casualties, while some damages were found. It was important that communities were well organized and motivated to inspect and maintain the bridges from time to time and equipped with necessary skills for repairing the small scale damages. In collaborations with the NGOs that have conducted community participatory projects in any fields, the NGO with the expertise of civil engineering could support efficiently and effectively the community taking charge of constructing bridges and ownership on the constructed bridge sustainably. The lessons learned are summarized to enable to construct the bridges through community initiatives for providing access over river crossing to rural communities.