Progress is being made on rehabilitating some of Zimbabwe’s arterial road routes, which link the country and neighbouring Zambia to the ports of Durban and Beira.There are 88 000 kilometres of classified roads in Zimbabwe, 17 400km of which are paved.About 5% of the network is classified as primary roads, which includes the Pan-Africa Highway.Around 80% of the volume of goods carried in the country is transported by road.An indication of the volumes is that north- and southbound, around 480 trucks a day pass through Beitbridge.As a result, one of the priorities of the national Rehabilitation Programme Phase 2 is the Beitbridge-Harare-Chirundu road link on the Pan-Africa Highway.According to a Twitter announcement by the ministry of transport and infrastructure development, 355km of the 580km Beitbridge-Harare link has been rehabilitated.Work on the 342km Harare-Chirundu link and Harare ring road is planned to start this year.Financing will come in part from the six toll gates on the route.There is currently a total of 26 toll gates in the country, according to the A A Zimbabwe.To the east, construction has also started on the Harare-Mutare road, which will be made into a double carriageway to speed up transport between the Mozambican port of Beira and the Zimbabwean capital.The road on the Mozambican side has largely been upgraded already.Rehabilitation of roads built in the 1960s and 1970s is being undertaken elsewhere in Zimbabwe, with the government emphasising that it is working on both rural roads as well as those used by hauliers.It sees roads as key economic enablers in line with the vision of attaining an upper-middle-income economy by 2030.
