Take a moment and imagine your daily life without roads. Everything necessary to survive and thrive – food, shelter, work, medical care, education – would suddenly be difficult or impossible to access. This is a daily reality for many people in emerging economies, where road networks are underdeveloped or unreliable due to poor maintenance.
“In emerging economies, roads can provide access to communities that were not previously connected to services or opportunities,” said Henri Blas, the chief content officer of the Global Infrastructure Hub. Founded in 2014, the GI Hub is a non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating sustainable and equitable infrastructure around the world, working to improve investment and resilience. “When you look at the return on investment from building and maintaining roads, the economic and social benefits can both be significant,” Blas said.
However, roads are expensive: Governments spend roughly $218 billion on them worldwide every year. Developing countries struggle to finance new road construction or to finance road maintenance, leading to the deterioration or disappearance of essential transport corridors. At the same time, emissions from transport are a significant driver of climate change. Road trips generating nearly 75 percent of transport emissions, and the materials and construction of road infrastructure contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Asphalt, for example, is a petroleum byproduct. Furthermore, inspection and maintenance vehicles are driven hundreds of thousands of kilometers over road networks every year. As Amelia Burnett, who works on technology applications in infrastructure at the GI Hub, explained: “There is a real tension between the social and economic benefits of roads and their environmental impact.”
Driven by this paradox, the GI Hub launched a program to increase the sustainability of roads in emerging markets. In collaboration with a group of multilateral development bank partners, the GI Hub has a new, more accessible way for developing countries to harness technology on a larger scale to make building and maintaining roads cheaper and more sustainable.
The GI Hub decided to build this program around technology solutions, based on feedback from the governments and funders they work with. “After hundreds of hours of conversations, we found a key need kept coming up,” Burnett said. “A lack of knowledge about the costs and benefits of applying technology has resulted in some potentially transformative technologies not being adopted.”
The GI Hub uses the term InfraTech, an abbreviation for Infrastructure Technology, to refer to technologies that can help build and maintain cleaner, greener, more affordable infrastructure. These solutions range from smart meters that facilitate water conservation to AI-powered planning to reduce transport emissions. But when they started the program, the GI Hub needed partners with a deep understanding of road projects in emerging markets, to make sure they met the needs of developing economies. To do this, they partnered with multilateral development banks.
As international financial institutions that support and finance development projects in poorer countries, these banks know the challenges and needs of different regions and are key players in infrastructure development. This made them the ideal partners to help identify solutions that would be the right fit for use in developing countries. The program hoped to create opportunities for technology to be adopted at scale, rather than simply on a project-by-project basis, to help amplify long-term impact.
The GI Hub program, meanwhile, has helped these banks invest wisely. The African Development Bank, or AfDB, for example, wanted more cost-effective road maintenance. “It is still very difficult to get road maintenance financed in emerging markets,” says AfDB’s transport and logistics division manager, Marco Yamaguchi. “The private sector is less willing to invest in contracts to operate and maintain roads in Africa. To attract them, we need ways to repay that investment, and technology is one way. When I saw the GI Hub’s program, I knew we had to get involved.”
Finally was the GI Hub joined by eight multilaterals development banks, operating jointly across every region of the world. Together, the team identified technologies that could make the biggest difference to the sustainability of roads in emerging markets.
After reviewing more than 50 different applications from technology companies, the GI Hub narrowed the field to five technology solutions that can meet road construction, maintenance and safety requirements while reducing both costs and emissions. One uses AI to provide real-time data on road repair needs, drastically reducing the need for maintenance vehicles to run the network looking for problems. A second uses high-resolution satellite imagery to ward off potential landslides, and a third is a cutting-edge application that extends the life of asphalt.
“These solutions can be transformative in low-income economies with limited resources,” Burnett said. “What we have created is an actionable and repeatable process to integrate InfraTech into project development, which any bank can adopt tomorrow.”
The AfDB is already implementing these strategies. AfDB, one of the largest infrastructure funders on the African continent, consistently finances up to $1 billion a year on road projects. 54 member states. Yamaguchi is eager to implement and build on the GI Hub’s work. He points to the need to maintain life-changing projects like the AfDB-financed Senegambia Bridgewhich reduced travel time between Gambia and Senegal from two days to 10 minutes and dramatically increased trade between the two countries.
Under Yamaguchi’s leadership and with the support of the GI Hub, the AfDB will launch a new Sustainable Roads Maintenance Program for Africa in 2024, which will help maintain roads throughout the continent. “Climate action is one of the highest priority areas for the bank,” he said. “We had already developed the concept, and the GI Hub helped us accelerate the process.”
For the GI Hub’s Blas, this program is just the beginning. “It’s not fair or practical to stop building roads in emerging markets, so instead we aim to make that infrastructure more sustainable,” he said. “We need to do the same for all infrastructure, and technology is key to the transformation.”
He envisions a global knowledge center for InfraTech solutions, expanding beyond transport to sectors such as waste and water. He also emphasized the need for data, saying it is key for governments and the private sector to align their goals and invest together. Only then, he said, can investment grow at scale.
“By showing the policies and practices that led to investment, we can help others replicate those solutions in other countries and on other projects. That’s the ultimate goal — it’s goal-driven progress through collaboration.”
The Global Infrastructure Hub, or GI Hub, is a non-profit organisation, formed by the G20, which promotes the delivery of sustainable, resilient and inclusive infrastructure.
