St. Vincent and the Grenadines will kick off a three-year, $120 million national road rehabilitation project in 2023, to be funded by a soft loan from the government of Taiwan, supervised substantially by the Taiwanese firm Overseas Engineering & Construction Company (OECC), and utilizing Vincentian subcontractors.
Camilo Gonsalves, the Minister of Finance, said on Monday that the National Road Rehabilitation Project will spend at least $27 million of its total $120 million budget in 2023. The rest will be spent in 2024 and 2025.
“The moment that the resources become available from Taiwan, the plan is for the OECC to begin roadwork on the roads for which designs and costings already exist.” While those shovel-ready roads are being rehabilitated, the design and costing of the remaining roads will continue, ensuring that there is minimal downtime between completing one road and beginning the next. “The Ministry of Transport and Works, led by Minister Montgomery Daniel, has met extensively with the leadership of the OECC, and we are confident that we have applied lessons learned from past major road projects to ensure that the National Road Rehabilitation Project proceeds smoothly and seamlessly,” he said.
“One of those past major projects is the CDB-funded National Disaster Management (NDM) Programme, which was lagging far behind expectations. In the 2022 Budget Speech, we announced that we were revamping the implementation and staffing arrangements for the project. Our back-to-the-board approach is bearing fruit. Budget 2023 allocates $20 million to NDM projects, including roads and bridges in Hopewell, North Union, Perseverance, and Orange Hill, and we are confident that all works will proceed expeditiously. “All but one of the sub-projects in the NDM program will be advertised for tender by the end of this month,” the minister stated.
Gonsalves said there are 117 other individual road projects; these roads, in aggregate, are allocated a further $16 million.
“Given their current state of preparation, we are optimistic that each of these individual roads will commence in 2023.” Many others will also be completed. “A further $32 million is earmarked for the construction of bridges, many of which were damaged during the La Soufrière eruptions,” he opined.
Gonsalves said regarding the government’s ambitious road rehabilitation projects, the only lingering area of concern in Budget 2023 is the ongoing struggle to generate momentum in the “Construction of Secondary, Village, and Feeder Roads” project, which is financed through $86 million from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development and the OPEC Fund for International Development.
Budget 2023 allocates $7.9 million to this project this year, which is a relatively paltry portion of the $72 million remaining to be spent. “While roads will be built under the project this year, it will not achieve its promised potential without a radical structural revamp,” he said.
Notwithstanding the potential challenges, Gonsalves said Budget 2023 is confidently allocating over $50 million to the construction of roads and bridges this year, over half of which will be spent through the National Road Rehabilitation Project.
