Road Construction Fuels Growth
of Traffic Safety Solutions in Kenya
by Shem Oirere
Africa Correspondent
Paint and coatings players in Eastern Africa’s largest economy, Kenya, have woken up to more business
opportunities in recent months after the
country embarked on a rapid road expansion and improvement program to
accommodate increasing cargo and passenger traffic volumes and improve safety
on the roads.
Construction of new roads, expanding
existing ones and improving the status of
other road signage has triggered an expansion in the manufacture of appropriate traffic safety solutions such as road
marking paints, road studs, pavement
markers and new partnerships to achieve
quality and safer roads.
In addition, extending of the road network by the Ministry of Roads has also
opened a new window for the supply of
road markings equipment.
Kenya, with 93 percent of cargo
and passenger traffic relying on road
transport, has a road network of more
than 160,800 kilometers long. This includes 16,544 kilometers of National
Roads, managed by the Kenya National
Highways Authority; 12,549 kilometers
of urban roads under the Kenya Urban
Roads Authority; and an estimated
131,794 km of rural roads under Kenya
Rural Roads Authority.
The road network has approximately
61,936 kilometers, which are classified
and 98,950 kilometers, which remain
unclassified.
Several agencies under the Ministry
of Roads are undertaking the road
construction and improvement program with funding from national government and donors.
The Kenya National Highways
Authority (KeNHA), which manages,
develops, rehabilitates and maintains
national roads, has the largest share of
the highways that have either gotten a
brush of the road marking paints or are
in the process of being marked.
The state-agency has just finalized
the road marking of an estimated 476
kilometers of roads across the country with hot thermoplastic, a project
financed by revenues from the Road
Maintenance Levy Fund, managed by
another state-agency, Kenya Roads
Board. KeNHA has also installed reflective studs on the highways.
One of the landmark projects by
KeNHA, is the 52-kilometer Thika
Superhighway linking Kenya’s capital
Nairobi to the satellite town of Thika
and which is financed by the African
Development Bank, the government of
Kenya and Exim Bank of China. The
$330 million highway is part of the larger
Nairobi-Addis Ababa Highway, which
is a section of the Trans Africa Highway
running from Cape Town in South Africa
to Cairo in Egypt.
22 | Coatings World
www.coatingsworld.com
May 2013
