230 | Green Roads for Water
PHOTO 15.2
Community mobilization for road-water harvesting in Amhara, Ethiopia
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program’s momentum. The program led to a “success breeds success” effect as improved access to water encouraged experimentation with new crops (fruit trees) and new land management methods. The roads-for-water activities were implemented in Tigray beginning in 2014 and spread to other states in Ethiopia beginning in 2015 (in particular, the states of Amhara, Oromia, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region). The measures consisted of floodwater spreaders from road surfaces, flow dividers at culverts, infiltration trenches parallel to or perpendicular to road alignments, and storage ponds and recharge ponds supplied by the runoff guided by road bodies. These measures quickly gained in popularity and, beginning in 2016, accounted for 25 percent of all the measures undertaken under the watershed campaigns. About 1,670,000 people were involved in the campaigns from 2016–2018. Based on a full 40-day engagement per person (Yaron 2018), this is equivalent to mobilizing 66.8 million labor days.
Bangladesh: Labor contracting societies working on road development Labor contracting societies (LCSs) were developed in Bangladesh in the 1980s. LCSs were intended to create labor opportunities for landless and marginal farmers (owning less than 0.2 hectares) in the construction and maintenance of small infrastructure. To facilitate this form of community engagement, the
