The Minister for Roads and Highways, Kwame Governs Agbodza, has announced that all districts across the country will now receive yearly allocations from the Road Fund to support maintenance and rehabilitation works.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Friday, August 1, the Minister explained that changes have been made to the structure of the Road Fund to ensure equitable distribution of resources for road maintenance across all districts.
“You will notice that we have changed the Road Fund to Road Maintenance Trust Fund,” the Minister stated.
“We are targeting that over the period, we are aiming hopefully with resources to improve over 5,000 kilometres of road.
He noted that the government’s priority is on what he called “economic feeder roads,” which are roads that lead to cocoa growing areas, tourist sites, and food-producing zones such as cashew and other cash crops.
Mr Agbodza said the newly structured fund will work like other statutory funds, like the District Assembly Common Fund and the GETFund.
“What I tried to do was to say that the Road Fund now becomes just like any statutory fund that its allocation goes to Parliament from Members of Parliament. So every district every year gets an allocation,” he explained.
“There will no longer be a district that doesn’t see money from the Road Fund,” he added.
“Sometimes there’s a road that just needs maybe 100,000 cedis to patch some potholes to keep it going. But because we are not able to do that, the whole thing deteriorates, becomes a big gully and then cuts the road.”
