While underdevelopment can result from many factors, its relationship with natural disasters — such as earthquakes or floods — is strong and mutually reinforcing.
For example, a lack of proper sewage or flood management infrastructure in regions prone to heavy rain makes communities more vulnerable to its effects, ranging from waterborne diseases to becoming cut off from health, education, and employment opportunities. At the same time, heavy rain makes building such infrastructure slow and more technically challenging. The World Bank estimates that without urgent action, climate change impacts could push 132 million people into poverty over the next decade.
According to Bridges to Prosperity, a United States-based nonprofit that partners with local governments to connect communities via footbridges, benefits of such infrastructure include an increase in the number of women entering the labor force and an overall increase in labor market income.
For infrastructure to bring these kinds of benefits, however, a holistic approach is required, with locals involved in everything from project design to implementation. Communities should, for example, be empowered to determine what infrastructure will best serve them, and they should be upskilled and potentially employed to help scale projects. Only then will communities develop stronger systems and break the cycle of vulnerability.
Every community has a unique set of characteristics and externalities that can affect its access to water, food, electricity, and more, said Tam Nguyen, head of bechtel.org, the social arm of Bechtel’s engineering, construction, and project management company. “Equally, they also have unique experiences and local know-how that can act as an opportunity. This is what we need to tap into and make transformative. It’s a critical success factor to delivering any community infrastructure projects.”
Impact infrastructure: Local views on building community-resilient infrastructure
In this special report, Devex and bechtel.org set out to learn more about challenges and solutions related to “impact infrastructure.” Through in-depth interviews with local development experts in five different regions, the report examines community-level infrastructure development across the project lifecycle, from conception to design to execution and maintenance.
The key challenge when developing infrastructure projects in regions that experience extreme weather events or natural disasters, and where communities are scattered and live far from existing infrastructure, is to ensure communities not only adapt to local conditions — mitigating or avoiding perils in the short term — but also develop longer-term resilience to them.
In these situations, the right kind of infrastructure both stands up well to different climate conditions and enables communities themselves to thrive — something even more vital following the outbreak of COVID-19 — according to the “impact infrastructure” concept developed by bechtel.org.
New pipelines and plants could provide access to critical utilities such as clean water and power, while schools, hospitals, bridges, and roads could allow access to education, health, and employment opportunities, said Thomas Donoghue, manager of innovation ventures and business development at Bechtel. Agricultural infrastructure — such as water storage or irrigation systems and nature-based systems such as mangroves or seagrass — can also help communities succeed in the long term, he said.
Developing such infrastructure can, however, be challenging from an engineering and logistics perspective, especially when standardized procedures are not in place.
For example, in an early project for Bridges to Prosperity, a cable spool weighing as much as a car had to somehow be transported 6 miles down a ravine and across a river to build a long-span bridge connecting Ethiopian communities on either side of the Blue Nile, recalled President and CEO Avery Bang.
Solutions must also be high-quality, stressed Kristi Ragan, chief of party for the INVEST project at international development company DAI, which is implementing the U.S. Agency for International Development program to research, develop, and build blended finance solutions for development challenges.
“The ‘last mile’ doesn’t need the dregs of our technology,” she said. “They need the most advanced technologies and innovations.” Scaling-up is also difficult — a challenge that can be exacerbated by social complexities and if solutions are not relevant and useful to the communities they will serve, Ragan added.
Through its Resilient, Economic and Community Housing framework, or REACH, bechtel.org is building a template for impact infrastructure that it believes will help partners in the remote Andes Mountains of Latin America scale up housing projects quickly, cost-effectively, and with greater social impact.
The template includes ways that applied technologies may be leveraged — for example, using drones to simplify complex logistics and augmented reality to improve community adoption and acceptance.
“We’re trying to create a framework where if you remove Bechtel from the equation, the local community and others could take that framework and continue to build resilient housing, for example, or they could transplant that framework to a different country and it should be adaptable and scalable for that area,” Donoghue said.
“Green-gray” principles — blending engineering and disaster risk-reduction practices with nature-based solutions — are another area that bechtel.org is focused on.
One example of this approach can be found in the Philippines. U.S.-based environmental nonprofit Conservation International and bechtel.org are designing and building solutions that combine mangrove restoration and rubble mound breakwaters — artificial offshore structures made from rubble that protect harbors and beaches from wave action — to improve coastal protection in the province of Iloilo, with the aim of helping communities withstand and recover from typhoons and other disasters.
A design-led, people-centered approach — with community needs, local customs, and intended social impact guiding every stage of a project — is essential for impact infrastructure in last-mile communities. Infrastructure companies and their development partners must begin by consulting intended recipients, asking how they can deliver impact, and then creating an execution plan around that, said Carlos Alarco, Bechtel’s president for the Latin America region.
In the Peruvian Andes, for example, housing designs must honor strong local preferences for cooking over a low fire rather than preparing food while standing upright, he said. Otherwise, new homes may simply be abandoned.
Communication with communities must continue throughout the life span of a project and beyond, Ragan said. And while targeting local leaders remains an efficient first step to achieve community buy-in, engaging broader voices — including women, young people, the unemployed, and all future users of any infrastructure — is important, she added.
Building projects to scale and improving community resilience also rely on the empowerment of local communities, either through training locals or employing them in the construction of infrastructure or provision of related services.
Partnering with diverse organizations — for example, having private sector companies and tech innovators work side by side with local and national governments, nongovernmental organizations, and other development actors — can help impact infrastructure projects tap into different skills and perspectives while benefiting from political clout and access to capital.
The involvement of governments is invaluable in infrastructure development, said independent development consultant Mark Clack. Their custodianship of countries’ master plans gives them a unique ability to bring projects to scale. At the same time, private sector infrastructure experts have access to cutting-edge technology and experience in logistics, procurement, standardization, and cost control that ensure projects are delivered safely, efficiently, on time, and within budget.
State support has been key to enabling Bridges to Prosperity’s recently approved program to build 350 bridges across Rwanda, which will be backed by $12 million of government funding under President Paul Kagame’s national transformation strategy, Bang said. Bridges to Prosperity also runs an industry program targeting private sector partners such as Arup, Bechtel, or WSP, whose specific expertise can plug a gap at the nonprofit organization.
“The ‘last mile’ doesn’t need the dregs of our technology.”
— Kristi Ragan, INVEST chief of party, DAIA data-driven mindset is key to decision-making around impact infrastructure, including how projects are planned and implemented, according to Bang. “A lot of times, people have great intentions, but if you don’t have a good framework for understanding how those decisions are being made, your intentions don’t mean much,” she said.
Bridges to Prosperity uses Salesforce technology to gather data in the field digitally and then makes that available to staffers in a push-and-pull format via dashboards. For example, one lead data program that Bridges to Prosperity runs sees ground enumerators visiting communities where bridges have already been built to understand how the infrastructure is working for the community and the ways in which people’s lives have changed or not.
It uses data like this for everything from improving worker safety to identifying bridge sites and demonstrating to governments the potential impact their investments could have.
Building resilience in last-mile communities is a complex ask for the development community and its partners, and infrastructure is only one part of the puzzle. But with the right approach, technology and partnerships, infrastructure can help empower communities to thrive long after a project is delivered.
To discover more ways of building resilient communities, read the full report.