The road to Ndélé

On the road to Ndélé, the Central African Republic’s (CAR) largest northern city,  Kotamale is just another isolated village in the Nana Grebizi prefecture.  However, Kotomale is also home to one of a few small, dilapidated bridges that span the Kodo river.

In order for a truck to cross the Kodo river, the driver must negotiate a price with local laborers to completely unpack the truck, carry the goods from one side of the river to the other and then repack the truck on the other side.  With trucks that are often loaded with everything from food and clothing to tools and cement, this process often takes several hours.

Once the truck is unpacked, it must be driven down the river bank, through the river and then up the other side.  However,  trucks often get stuck in the river, trying to climb up the other side. Thus, the driver must again negotiate with the local laborers to get them to pull the truck out of the river, taking more time and costing even more money.

Crumbling infrastructure - a city cut off

At river crossing points throughout the country,  the metal skeletons of bridges, stripped of the wooden or metal surface that would allow vehicles and pedestrians to cross, are all that remain of the civil infrastructure.   Communities surrounding the bridges often deal with the most urgent repairs by scraping together a few crumbling logs and then binding them to the bridge’s framework with vines.  The repairs work for pedestrians and cyclists, but are useless for the trucks filled with goods or humanitarian aid.

Moreover, the recently concluded fighting between government and rebel forces had destroyed several of the few remaining functioning bridges. Even still, most bridges are rendered impassable during the rainy season, with many rivers swelling to more than 10 times their size, flooding the bridges and roads that lead to them. Unsurprisingly, decades of extreme poverty have made repairing existing bridges an enormous economic challenge for the government.

With bridges in this kind of condition, Ndélé often finds itself completely cut off from the capital, Bangui, as well as the rest of the country: going months without commercial deliveries, humanitarian aid,  personal or professional travel.   Because of a lack of something as simple as plywood, tens of thousands of people are completely isolated from the rest of their country.

Working to reconnect the country

Financed by the multi-donor Emergency Response Fund, managed by UNDP, ACTED has launched a project to repair this critical part of CAR’s transportation infrastructure and maintain access to Ndélé year round.  The work has already begun and the project hopes to finish quickly, as the rainy season is just picking up speed.  In the coming months, ACTED plans to restore dozens of other bridges across the country.

For more information about ACTED’s work in CAR please contact:

Yannick Deville
Head of Mission
yannick.deville@acted.org