Solomon Islands is a large Melanesian country, composed of 6 big islands, dozens of smaller islands, and several hundreds of islets and atolls. As of 2010, about 80% of its 500,000 people lived in the rural areas, in widely dispersed villages of a few hundred people. It has remained one of the least developed Pacific member countries of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), with an economy that has been disadvantaged by a dispersed population, limited natural resources, and relatively high cost of providing remote communities with the necessary infrastructure and basic services to stimulate productivity.
In 2010, ADB assisted the government in preparing the National Transport Plan (NTP), which identified priority transport needs, including the construction of new infrastructure, rehabilitation, and maintenance of existing assets and institutional reforms. The National Transport Fund (NTF) started operating during the same year as a financial vehicle for supporting the NTP priority projects. It pooled together government and development partner contributions, including $30 million each from the governments of Australia and New Zealand for civil works, and $12.5 million from the Government of Solomon Islands.
As the Ministry of Infrastructure Development (MID) had insufficient capacity to implement the proposed civil works, ADB provided a $12 million grant from the Asian Development Fund for project implementation support. The grant covered the costs of consulting services for the establishment and operationalization of a consolidated Central Project Implementation Unit (CPIU) within the MID, the preparation of a feasibility study, bidding documents, and contracts for the civil works, selection and training of small contractors in labor-based maintenance, and MID staff technical and managerial capacity development. It was complemented by a technical assistance grant of $0.8 million from the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction that supported the preparation and implementation of a comprehensive institutional reform and capacity development plan for MID.
Project performance was mixed. Delivery of 100% of works in the CPIU’s approved annual work plan by the fifth year was not met across all subsectors, with final investment in wharves registering the lowest accomplishment rate. It also did not achieve its capacity building goal to have government personnel gradually take over from consultants. But it did achieve adequate gender balance at the CPIU and exceeded its targets in providing technical and managerial training to MID staff. Even if it did not fully achieve its aim to unify key actors and development partners behind the NTP, it built a solid foundation for the pursuit of a long-term, programmatic approach to transport development in the country.
The project, assessed as successful by ADB’s Pacific Regional Department, took over 5.5 years to be completed. Financial closing date was extended twice, from 31 July 2016 originally to 31 December 2016 and then again to 30 June 2017. The second extension aimed to support the continued delivery of inputs from selected individual consultants until the Sustainable Transport Infrastructure Improvement Program was approved and a new team was mobilized.
MID was the project executing agency, and the CPIU, the implementing agency.
