New Rural Road Boosts Profits for Farmers

Enjil District, Herat Province – Farmer Najibullah is looking with satisfaction at the start of the dusty graveled Imam Shashnoor road in Kabuli village that connects to the asphalted road to Herat City.

“Thanks to the construction of this road, we are now making some 50 percent more profit as we now earn a minimum of AFN 500 (about $8.60) per day,” he says.

Farmers, like Najibullah, have benefited the most from the construction of the 10-kilometer (km) Imam Shashnoor road, which started in June 2013 and finished in February 2014. What was previously a two-hour journey by motor vehicle now takes only 20 minutess

“We would be late to the city market and our fruits would be late for sale leaving us with the only choice of selling below the actual cost,” recalls Najibullah, 35. The farmers also had to deal with a lot of other problems previously transporting their agricultural crops to the city, sometimes at the cost of losing a significant amount of their products to unreasonable road conditions.

“We used to transport the crops with donkeys. The donkey would sink up to its knees in mud. Some of our products such as tomatoes would rot along the way and no one would buy them,” Najibullah recounts.

The budget for the construction of Imam Shashnoor road was US$237,428 which was provided through the Afghanistan Rural Access Project (ARAP) under the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. ARAP, supported by the World Bank and Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, aims to enable rural communities across Afghanistan to benefit from improved access to basic services and facilities through all-weather roads.

To date, construction of 732 Km of tertiary roads and 825 meters of tertiary bridges have been completed. At the same time, maintenance of 3,139 km of tertiary roads and period maintenance of 237 km of tertiary roads were also completed.

Villages connected to the city

Right here in Kabuli village is the point where the asphalted road from Herat City ends and Imam Shashnoor road extends it into an array of surrounding villages. Some 125,000 residents of 75 other villages are now linked to each other and to Kabuli village in Enjil district, west of Herat City.

The rush on this graveled road is no less than that of the main roads inside Herat City, making it a relatively dusty road. “The road is far more resistant to being damaged this year compared to last year, though we are still struggling with dust,” says Ghulam Seddiq. “This issue, we know, we have to tolerate until the road is asphalted.”

Nonetheless, Ghulam Seddiq, head of the Community Development Council for Kabuli village, is pleased with the road, on which he says now takes half the time to commute to his village and the surrounding areas from the city.