Well, it is more than a year since I wrote my last post on
this blog- so lots to catch up on I guess! But first thing first; season’s
greetings and wishing you all a fantastic 2014!!
On the home front, 2013 began with sense of déjà vu as my son
was preparing for his eleven plus exams. I distinctly remember one of my posts,
written a couple of years ago, moaning about the process the poor young kids
have to go through, when my daughter was preparing for the same exam. Anyway
all’s well that ends well as he too managed to pass his exam with flying colours!
On the professional front, I think the start of the 2013 was
a good one as I managed to team-lead an E-Freightex project in East Africa. At
the very simple, an E-Freightex is an acronym used for an online freight
exchange, which is a service for consignees, consignors, shippers, freight
carriers, logistics providers, clearing/freight forwarder agents etc. that
helps facilitate movement of cargo both internationally and/or domestically. It
can potentially also be seen as a one-stop shop for importing/exporting goods
from within and/or outside a country or a region. Some of the potential
benefits include:
- Improved market information potentially resulting in increased competition;
- Potentially reducing administrative outlay and logistics costs;
- Increased truck load factors and shortened turnaround times thereby reducing transport costs and increasing operators’ profits; and
- Catalyst to improved freight services such as insurance, IT solutions, etc.
The project finished on time and more importantly within the
commissioned budget. Whilst most of the time I was based in Kenya (Nairobi) but
I also had a chance to go around and meet the key stakeholders in the region
including a trip to beautiful Rwanda.
There were fun times too; and that included visiting the
Nairobi National Park. The official website (http://www.kws.org/parks/parks_reserves/NANP.html)
claims that the park, located within 10 km from Nairobi city, is a unique
ecosystem, being the only protected area in the world close to a capital city. I
think I had an awesome time visiting the park. You see, I have been to some
“fake” (man made) safaris in the world but to experience something like a visit
to the “real” park was beyond any comparison and can simply not be written in words-
so my advise is that this park is worth a visit in your life time! As far as
the ecosystem is concerned, out of Africa’s big five (lion, leopard, elephant,
cape buffalo and rhinoceros), I could spot three of them (lions, buffalos and a
white rhino) roaming free in their natural habitat. Albeit difficult to
describe how one feels when he/she spots any of these fearsome animals at such
a close range but when I saw them there was an immediate rush of blood in my
body; it was followed by some goosebumps; I also felt excited; may be a tiny
bit scared and nervous too; surely felt exhilarated and the reactions kept on
varying until the predators disappeared back in the tall grasses of the park! To
sum up, the deafening silence when I spotted them was breathtakingly amazing and
could have easily killed the brave hearts!
Later part of the 2013 landed me to Solomon Islands. Wow,
what a place – a hidden treasure on the face of it! At the outset, people seemed
a bit laid back but they were humble and welcoming! Although I didn’t explore
much on the tourism side of things but I hear the beaches are worth visiting!
Internet facilities are expensive but the wireless connection works at most of
the places. Food is good; one may argue it is overpriced but the same gets
compensated when one sees the portion size. In a bid to keep people healthy and
fit, the city is full of signs saying, “Have you had your 30 minutes walk
today”?
So what was I doing in Solomon Islands? Well, the answer was conduct of road feasibility
studies. Barring the capital town (Honiara), rest of the provincial areas or
other provinces all have unsealed roads. They say every project is different and one learns new things from every
new project. So this one was no different. Over the last fifteen years or so I
did not come across any road project that had such low traffic volume count (less
than 20 vehicles a day)! In addition to this, even light rain causes river
levels to rise causing flooding; and the communities are cut off from
surrounding capital town as roads and bridges are washed out. To cut the long
story short, I had to think outside the box and look beyond doing the conventional
transport analysis to successfully complete the feasibility study.
In my bid to quantify the benefits I also avoided using the
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA), which compares the cost of interventions
with their intended impacts. This was in line with the World Bank guidance that
sets out that the impacts of transport interventions are mainly economic in
nature and should be measured. In addition to this, unlike the traditional transport Cost Benefits Analysis (CBA), where projects
normally are deemed “uneconomic” when their Economic Internal Rate of Return (EIRR)
falls below 10-12%, there are no well-established criteria for determining
“opportunity cost” thresholds when ranking on the basis of cost-effectiveness.
Such a determination is then left to policy makers. For example, if access can
be provided to two, otherwise similar communities at say $100 per person served
and $50 per person served, respectively, cost-effectiveness criteria would
clearly “rank” the latter community higher. However, the question that still remains
unanswered is whether $50 per capita is a sufficient “return” to justify
intervention i.e. could that $50 per person be spent with more impact in
another sector, or would it yield an EIRR of 10-12% considering the opportunity
cost of capital in the country?
The key issues that I managed to raise included improvements
in access both to education and to health care due to provision of better roads.
In addition to this, both of these improvements also contributed directly to
achievement of the key Millennium Development Goals (MDG 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education; MDG 4: Reduce Child Mortality; and MDG 5: Improve Maternal Health). What might seem to be unfortunate but the truth remains that on an average 20 people (including children, pregnant women, old people
etc.) are being killed every year due to poor transport access to better
health facilities in one of the study areas. I also noticed a considerable logging activity prevalent in and around the study area/s. It seemed that although the private companies do maintain
certain sections of the roads every now and then but the same was done as per
their convenience and on adhoc basis. Therefore recommendations were made to
the agency staff to speak to the owners of such companies to explore potential
contribution from them towards rehabilitating the project road.
Whilst the potential risks of delivering the
asset were highlighted in detail; the client’s attention was also drawn to the
risks of not delivering the asset especially for a fragile economy like Solomon
Islands. In the end, I managed to finish the feasibility study on time; and I
am led to believe that it went well with the client!
No comments:
Post a Comment