AfDB approves €44 mn for road connecting Chad's east, south regions

The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank Group approved grants worth €44.16 million to Chad on 22 November 2024 to construct the roughly 50 km Kyabé-Mayo section of the road between Kyabé and Singako, a distance of 49.5 km, combined with the construction of a 55-metre bridge.

The funding comprises a grant of €3.2 million from the African Development Fund, the Bank Group’s concessional funding window and another grant of €40.96 million from the Transition Support Facility, a mechanism designed to provide additional concessional resources to countries facing situations of fragility and conflict.

The project will help open up the southern and eastern regions of Chad, and build resilience in target communities, especially for women and youth. It will help improve transport conditions for goods and people between Kyabé and Singako by creating a road that will be passable throughout the year and facilitate the flow of agricultural and agropastoral products from the fertile areas of Moyen Chari and Salamat to the consumption centres of Sarh, Moundou, N’Djamena and Abéché. It will also open up the region to neighbouring Sudan.

As a landlocked country in Central Africa, Chad is a long distance from the sea, and the new road will help to reduce the very high transport costs along the major regional corridors. The Kyabé-Mayo section of the road between Kyabé and Singako is one of the missing links in the N’Djamena-Moundou-Sarh-Kyabé-Am Timan-Abéché corridor and forms part of the critical priority network that the government of Chad wants to build to ensure permanent coverage and accessibility across the whole of the country.

The new road will help open up the country, provide better links to domestic and regional markets and strengthen the process of economic integration, particularly the effective implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The project will be implemented over a five-year period, from 2025 to 2029.

“The Bank is one of Chad’s preferred financial partners in the transport sector and its intervention policy in this sector targets the country’s main agricultural production areas,” declared the Bank’s Director General for Central Africa, Serge N’Guessan, following the approval. “The Bank has already been involved in developing the Koumra-Sahr section of the N’Djamena-Abéché corridor. Its intervention in the Kyabé-Mayo section is therefore in line with other developments planned for this corridor and will be a tangible expression of the institution’s key support for Chad, with the aim of lifting it out of fragility and strengthening the resilience of its population, in a country with one of the least dense road networks on the continent,” added N’Guessan.

The road will help to reduce the impact of pockets of fragility and poverty in the area and support the emergence of agropastoral processing activities driven by the private sector and building on the stock of key connecting road infrastructure. The area has a number of comparative advantages, making it ripe for promoting and developing promising sectors and processing products such as shea butter, groundnut, sesame and other crops.

The project includes activities related to gender equality, climate change and support for young people and women to help them achieve their full potential.

The Bank is one of Chad’s strategic financial and technical partners. The Country Strategy Paper (CSP) for Chad for 2023-2025 is based on two pillars: the first aims to develop infrastructure to secure strong and more diverse economic growth, while the second is designed to promote good governance to increase the effectiveness of public action and the attractiveness of the economic environment.