The Uganda Road Fund was established by Government to finance routine and periodic maintenance of public roads. On a quarterly basis monitoring and evaluation is undertaken to ensure value for money of the funds disbursed to Designated Agencies (DAs). The road maintenance programme aims to reduce the rate of deterioration of roads, lower vehicle operating costs, travel time, and safety of road users.

The total road network across the country totals 159,160 km. out of which for 21,010 km (13.2%) is for National roads while a total of 138,150km (86.8%) are for district, urban, and community access (DUCA) roads. In FY 2022/23, Government allocated Ushs 487.96 billion to the Uganda Road Fund to undertake road maintenance. Ushs 307.43 billion was allocated for national roads maintenance and Ushs 174.045 billion for DUCA roads maintenance.

The Monitoring and Evaluation Report for Road Maintenance Programmes released by Uganda Road Fund (URF), for the period July to December 2022, reveals that out of the planned disbursement of UGX 481.475 billion for the First and Second Quarter of the FY, UGX 208.001 billion (42.6%) was released and UGX 197.125 billion was spent.

As part of the funds disbursed to the selected UNRA Stations of Kampala, Masindi, and Moroto, the overall performance of road maintenance stood at 84.3% on average for national roads as of December 2022. On the other hand, overall performance for DUCA roads maintenance for the selected 9 district Local Governments stood at 58.3% on average.

The poor performance on DUCA roads maintenance was attributed to insufficient and high breakdown rate for obsolete road equipment, Frequent silting of road drainage leading to road degradation on paved roads, Inadequate and delays release of funds road maintenance and understaffing

In a bid to address the above constraints, it was recommended as follows: Balance between road development and maintenance in funding, equipping UNRA road stations and district local governments with equipment to improve efficiency and effectiveness, ensure adequate and timely releases of funds, revise the current staff structure to align it with the force account demands, fill the vacant positions and deploy regional technical support units for the local governments.

Source: https://roadfund.ug/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ME-Report-Q1-2-FY-2022-23.pdf