Rural Connectivity and the Rural Access Index
The Rural Access Index (RAI) has received a great deal of attention in recent months. The RAI is defined as the proportion of rural population who live within 2 km of an all-season road. The RAI was a key feature of the PIARC World Road Congress in Abu Dhabi, during which a half-day workshop was held to raise the profile of the RAI, as a vital Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator for measuring rural development and connectivity.
ReCAP and TRL, the implementation partner for the research, were privileged to have the Global Director of the Transport Practice at the World Bank and the Chief of Transport at the Asia Development Bank attend the workshop and participate as panellists. Altogether, 70 people attended the workshop to discuss the challenges of RAI measurement. A presentation on the RAI was also made at the UK Exhibition Stand, and the RAI paper that won the UK prize for sustainable development by the World Road Association (WRA), was included as a poster presentation.
ReCAP and the TRL team delivering the RAI study have since been very busy presenting the research at the AfricaGIS conference in Rwanda (18-22nd November 2019), the International Road Federation’s (IRF) 3rd International Conference on Sustainable Mobility in Morocco (26th November 2019), the SSATP Annual Meeting in Zimbabwe (26-29th November 2019), and the ieConnect workshop on impact evaluations in Morocco (3-6th December 2019).
TRL have prepared Supplemental Guidelines for Measuring Rural Access Using New Technologies to support the 2016 World Bank methodology for the calculation, documentation and publication of RAI, also known as SDG indicator 9.1.1. The Guidelines shall be published shortly, and will contain detailed, step-by-step procedures for measuring the RAI of a country, using geospatial population data (WorldPop), road network data (OpenStreetMap), and accessibility factors to determine all-season access. As part of the RAI research study, the measurement framework for the Supplemental Guidelines was trialled in Malawi, Myanmar and Nepal, to collect ground-truthed population, road network and road condition data from the road agencies and national statistics offices, used to verify the open datasets.
Azavea, a company specialised in GIS applications, have developed a Rural Access Index Measurement Tool, which is a proof of concept tool that displays the RAI for all countries globally. The tool follows the principles of the World Bank 2016 Methodology and Supplemental Guidelines, and utilises three open datasets (OpenStreetMap, WorldPop, GRUMP) to provide an estimate of the RAI. For the three trial countries (Malawi, Myanmar and Nepal) country-specific datasets have been used that are regarded as more accurate than the current open datasets, to generate scores that better reflect the RAI for those countries.
In the measurement tool, the RAI is provided as a percentage of rural population, and the Guidelines indicate how the RAI can also be presented as absolute numbers of rural population that do not have access to an all-season road, to enable more targeted and effective planning and prioritisation of high-risk areas.
Both the Supplemental Guidelines and a link to the RAI measurement tool will be published on the ReCAP website and the RAI web page by the end of 2019, and various options for collecting, managing, quality assuring and publishing the RAI data and indicator measurement will be explored, including the World Bank Data Catalogue and the UN Global Platform.
For more information on the Rural Access Index research commissioned by ReCAP, please contact Annabel Bradbury, ReCAP Deputy Team Leader and Transport Services Research Manager, on Annabel.bradbury@cardno.com.
Full project documentation on the RAI is available at: http://www.research4cap.org/SitePages/RAI.aspx.