Bids opened for Beledweyne road that will also bring a clinic, classrooms and water

MOGADISHU (SONNA): The Ministry of Public Works, Reconstruction and Housing has opened the bids for the upgrading of the 22 kilometre road between Beledweyne and Kalabayr, a project that includes six bridges together with a health centre, a community centre and classrooms, boreholes and roadside market sheds along its route.

The bids were opened by the State Minister for the Ministry, Said Mohamed Mohamud, known as Xayd, with Ministry officials, the team of the Road Infrastructure Programme Somalia and representatives of the competing companies present. The Ministry said the opening was conducted under the procurement procedures of the African Development Bank, and described the step as one intended to identify a company with the technical capacity, experience and competence the work requires.

The programme within which the road sits, the Road Infrastructure Programme Somalia, is funded by the African Development Bank and the African Development Fund, the European Union and the Multi-Partner Somalia Infrastructure Fund.

The facilities attached to the road are what distinguish this tender from a straightforward stretch of construction. A road brings traffic past places that previously had none, and a market shed, a clinic and a borehole placed along it are the means by which the people living there take something from that traffic rather than watching it pass. The classrooms and community centre are of the same order. What is being tendered is a corridor with services on it.

The Ministry said the road matters for connecting communities and for the movement of people, vehicles and goods, and that it is expected to contribute to connectivity across the Horn of Africa as well as within Somalia. That is a substantial claim for a road of this length, and it rests on where it sits. Beledweyne is on the route north from Mogadishu towards the Ethiopian border, and improvements on that corridor bear on traffic that does not stop in Hiiraan.

It also arrives at a point when regional trade facilitation has moved up the agenda. Somalia today chaired the first meeting of trade ministers of the Horn of Africa Initiative in Addis Ababa, where the ministers of six countries focused on trade corridors, customs procedures and connecting ports to landlocked neighbours. Roads are what those discussions are ultimately about.

The Ministry said the project forms part of the government’s plan to develop the country’s road infrastructure, and cited the position of the Minister of Public Works, Reconstruction and Housing, Ayub Ismail Yusuf, that development projects should be carried out through processes built on transparency, accountability, open competition and quality, so that the public receives road infrastructure that is well built and lasting.

The Ministry has a second roads programme running alongside this one. In August it signed an agreement with UNOPS for the study and design of a 54 kilometre road and a 100 metre bridge in Hargeisa, under the NAGAAD project, a 254 million dollar programme covering the federal member states, under which around 90 kilometres of road are in hand.

Beledweyne itself gives the work a further dimension. The town sits on the Shabelle and was largely submerged in the floods of late 2023, and the World Food Programme has identified flood risk for the coming Deyr season. A road with six bridges on that ground is built for water as much as for traffic.

The tender now proceeds to evaluation and award. The Ministry has said the process will be conducted under the Bank’s procurement rules, and that the standard it is applying is the capacity of the bidder to build the road to the quality specified.