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Bianca Mlilo, Business Reporter
THE African Development Bank has availed funding for the rehabilitation of the 200km Gwanda-Beitbridge road under the North-South Corridor (NSC) regional initiative.
NSC is targeting five roads in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Botswana, with the Zimbabwe rehabilitation being focused on two parts of the Beitbridge-Bulawayo road (Bulawayo to Gwanda stretch and Gwanda to Beitbridge) that will be done concurrently.
Three regional blocs — the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), the East African Community (EAC) and Southern African Development Community (Sadc), are working on the NSC to unlock the economic potential of landlocked countries in Southern and Eastern Africa.
In a notice, the tripartite said it intended to apply part of the agreed amount for this grant to payments under the contract for the preparation of feasibility studies, detailed engineering designs and tender documents for the rehabilitation of a 200km Gwanda-Beitbridge road section in Zimbabwe.
“The Government of Zimbabwe (GRZ) with support from the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite has received funding from the African Development Bank towards the cost of rehabilitation of the two sections of the North South Corridor-National Road No. A6 in Zimbabwe,” reads part of the notice.
“This contract was awarded to ICT Private Limited and Yooshin Engineering Corporation in association with Cascade (Zimbabwe) and ASCO (Zambia).”
As such the Gwanda Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) hearing for the road rehabilitation will be held at Mabheka Secondary School Hall today at 11am.
Beitbridge Town Council Boardroom and Zhophembe Primary School will be the venues for the Beitbridge EIA hearings, which will be held on August 2 and 3, 2016 at 9am and 11am respectively.
The costs of rehabilitating and maintaining the entire NSC road network to a good standard is estimated at $9,1 billion (of which $5,9 billion is for capital investment and $3,1 billion will be recurrent costs).
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