BURKINA FASO’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE Another source of funding, less obvious and certainly much more difficult to implement, puts Burkina’s road spending challenge into a regional context. It calls for a hybrid system in which neighboring countries agree to not only endorse and enforce overloading regulations and facilitate the modernization of transport and logistics services in general, but also agree to share the rehabilitation and maintenance costs (as well as benefits) of the regional corridors across countries.

As discussed above, international and national connectivity—understood as the connection between the main national population centers and the neighboring

**Figure 9. By comparison with its neighbors, Burkina Faso has room to increase its allocation of resources to roads**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 2.0 20<br>1.8 18<br>1.6 16<br>1.4 14<br>1.2 12<br>1.0 10<br>0.8 8<br>0.6 6<br>0.4 4<br>0.2 2<br>0.0 0<br>As % GDP<br>Percenateg of GDP $ per capita<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Source_ : Gwillliam and others 2008.

capital cities—is adequate. But beyond the trunk network, accessibility falls off, particularly in rural areas. Less than one-fourth of Burkina Faso’s population lives within 2 km of an all-weather road— perhaps comparable to the average LIC in Africa but well below the level found in Sub-Saharan MICs (table 5). The clustering of Burkina Faso’s population in the middle of the country makes it comparatively demanding to achieve significant increases in rural accessibility by improving the quality of the existing rural network, in particular in the northeast areas of the country.

When making the necessary improvements, it is important to ensure that road investments are spatially synchronized with other interventions aimed at raising agricultural productivity. The need to provide a basic level of connectivity in the northeast of the country should also be taken into account. Road density is one of the main determinants of the cash income from agricultural sales in Burkina, along with agriculture yield, high-value crops, and direct selling to markets (World Bank 2009b).

# Rail

## **Achievements**

Burkina Faso has a transnational railway line jointly owned by Côte d’Ivoire. SITARAIL was established in 1995 as a result of the merger of the national railways of the two countries. The rail line links the port of Abidjan to Ouagadougou and is a key conduit for bulk freight from and into the landlocked hinterland of Burkina Faso. The line was the first in Sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded as a concession to the private sector. Benchmarking with other African rail lines indicates that SITARAIL is one of the strongest performers on a wide range of operational indicators, including labor productivity, traffic volumes, and average tariffs (table 6). Strong traffic growth took place during the first five years of the concession, from 1995 to 2000, when the volume of freight almost tripled from 450 million to 700 million tonne-km. But due to political disruptions that started in 2002, SITARAIL’s traffic volumes dropped dramatically. After the crisis, SITARAIL recovered progressively, and from 2006 onwards it once again reached, and 17