Kotchofa Sylvestre, President of the African Road Maintenance Fund Association, in the following interview with Cameroon Tribune, talks on the activities of his association.

How severe is the problem of road infrastructure in Africa that necessitated the setting up of the Association of African Road Managers and Practitioners (AGEPAR)?

In Africa, we have 15 landlocked countries that have no access to seaports. So, the United Nations, African Union and countries decided to link all these major cities to facilitate the transportation of goods and persons. That was the idea behind developing a trans-African highway network.

Have far have we gone with the projects and what has Africa been losing in the lack of roads?

There are many roads projects and we retained nine and they are about 80 per cent completed. According to a World Bank study, we have seen that if, for instance, 83 major African cities are linked by 100,000 km roads, it would increase the total revenue of Africa by 250 billion dollars in trade and because we have not done it, we are losing the money. We have also seen from a World Bank study that in 40 years, our share in world exports has decreased by two-third. Now, we are less than one per cent of this total exportation. If we had kept the level at which we were 30 years ago, we would have increased our revenue more than ten times the amount. So, it’s a big issue.

How much involvement are African States to these projects?

African governments know that the main means to transporting goods and persons is road. More than 90 per cent of our goods and persons are transported by road. The governments are involved in all our projects. In the budgets of the respective countries, the share for roads is usually the highest.