What’s unique about transport

Although transport budgets in many bilateral and multilateral agencies can be large (e.g. biggest single budget in the European Community, £2m in DFID 2001-2002), the community working on transport and mobility issues is relatively small, and fragmented. For example, collaboration between TRL, IFRTD, ILO-ASIST is not as well developed as it could be, and there are no formal systems that provide a brokerage service of information products and services (except the recent Resource Centre Scheme funded by DFID which includes TRL, IFRTD, NRI and ITDG and is set up to enable specific project activities and Technical Enquiries to take place for DFID’s Transport Programme).

DFID research into the dissemination of energy knowledge [i] points out that ‘The need for energy is peculiar in that it is a derived demand, i.e. people want cooked food, light and ways of reducing the effort/time to perform daily tasks – not energy in itself, but things requiring it. This has implications for the entry points to introduce energy knowledge. The issues that concern poor people should determine these entry points.’  The need for transport is also a derived demand: people want to be able to get to markets more easily; to access health clinics and get their sick to the nearest doctor faster; to get from point A to point B more safely; to have deliveries of a wider range of services into the community.  So, ‘Energy (and transport) knowledge would also be of benefit to decision-makers, professionals and intermediaries who are working to meet poor people’s needs in these areas’,

 A recent study [ii] concluded that poor men and women searching for appropriate technology solutions to livelihood problems are greatly dependent upon the social networks that exist in their communities, and are often ‘missed out’ by those disseminating information through traditional channels unless they are explicitly targeted by those institutions. The study revealed weaknesses in the assumptions made by many information disseminators, that if they get the information to ‘intermediaries’ who are working with the poor, that the information is efficiently and effectively re-purposed and repackaged for the end target audience. Intermediary organisations suffer from the same lack of skills and resources that larger, global organisations do in designing communications strategies that identify and satisfy the information and knowledge needs of their constituents (arguably they have more excuses for their failure than do the bigger organisations with more resources).

Other sectors e.g. water, energy have been able to gain a higher profile inside the development community, though its not clear whether they have been more successful in disseminating knowledge to the poor women and men searching for appropriate technology solutions.  This could be explained by:

It seems that the transport sector still has a lot of work to do to ‘demystify’ the technical aspects of transport provision, develop links with and market access and mobility issues to, other actors in the development sector.