Rural Accessibility Mapping : Completion Report for the East Asia and Pacific Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality

Traditionally, improvements to accessibility for rural women through World Bank transport programs have been measured by the change in the number of villagers who live within 2 km of an all-weather or paved road. Unfortunately, this indicator is not helpful for rural road maintenance or service planning, because the objective of our programs is not to maximize the number of persons living next to paved roads. Rather, it is to reduce travel times for the most villagers to the places they need to go, markets, schools, health clinics, etc. For example, if all roads traversing villages were paved, while the rest of the network is unpaved, we could achieve 100 percent success with the traditional indicator, without having actually improved the lives of the persons for which the project is intended.