The Rural Access Index (RAI) was originally developed as a poverty indicator for rural access and has been adopted as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 9.1.1. The RAI measures ‘the proportion of the rural population who live within 2 km of an all-season road’. It was originally developed and measured in 2006, using interpretation of existing household questionnaires, and some modelling techniques. This provided a baseline for more than 60 countries, but measurements were not continued. Seen the significance of the RAI, ReCAP has formulated and implemented various activities in its support. 

ReCAP work undertaken on the RAI

In 2015 the World Bank with assistance from ReCAP introduced a geospatial methodology to measure RAI, using three levels of GIS information:

During the first quarter of 2018, a Status Review of the RAI was carried out by Civil Design Solutions (CDS) to make recommendations to support achieving more rapid international progress with the updated measurement of the RAI.

A follow-on project was formulated to consolidate, revise and apply the RAI in pilots. A TRL research team is working with the World Bank, as custodian of SDG 9.1.1, other development banks and national authorities to enhance the process for measuring the RAI and promote its use as the key rural access indicator of the SDGs. The second phase has been completed and the third phase starts in February 2020.  

Details of the original definition and measurement of the RAI can be found in the World Bank report Rural AccessIndex: A Key Development Indicator (2006). 

Information about the UN Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goals Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) can be found on the the IAEG-SDGs web page.

See the World Bank report Measuring Rural Access: Using new technologies (2016) for further details of the pilot measurements.

Project Objectives

The main objective of the Status Review (first phase) was to assess international progress with the measurement of the RAI/SDG Indicator 9.1.1. and make recommendations to support more rapid and more extensive measurement of the RAI in the future.  

The objective of the second phase was to develop a harmonised approach to data collection and measurement of the RAI that was relevant, consistent and sustainable. The third phase aims to consolidate and promote the work carried out in the second phase, and establish a roadmap towards achieving Tier I status on the IAEG-SDG scale.  This would require that measurements are carried out by at least 50% of all of the 193 UN countries at regular intervals.

Challenges 

There were some challenges in calculating accurate RAI values for the trial countries (Ghana, Malawi, Myanmar and Nepal). They included:

·  Finding a common definition of "urban" and "rural"

·  Acquiring complete and accurate mapping of the road network

·  Defining the all-season status of a road/network

All-season = "a road that is motorable all year round by the prevailing means of rural transport (often a pick-up or a truck which does not have four-wheel-drive), with some predictable interruptions of short duration during inclement weather (e.g., heavy rainfall) allowed."

Accessibility Factors

In the 2016 methodology road condition was used to determine the all-season status of roads. The team discovered that condition was not often available for rural road networks, so they devised a way to assess the all-season status without imposing a burden to collect road condition data on countries with limited resources. This involved using Accessibility Factors as a proxy for road condition, as shown below: