13.09.2023

Project to improve rural road infrastructure in Côte d'Ivoire moves forward

Our project to set up road maintenance operation centers and train the skilled personnel needed for road maintenance in Côte d'Ivoire is making visible progress. Since the start of the project at the end of 2020, the first instructors/trainers to become site managers, machine operators and mechanics have now successfully graduated.

In the future, the graduates, pioneers of the Ivorian army, will act as instructors themselves and, after the practical education period, will train other employees in the steering and maintenance of construction machinery, in construction site management and as mechanics in the road maintenance operation center under the supervision of the experts from GAUFF Engineering. This transfer of knowledge is one of the essential building blocks in the project, in which a central road maintenance operation center with an associated training center is being built in Bouaké, as well as four further regional road maintenance operation centers in Bondoukou, San-Pedro, Séguéla and Odienné.

For this purpose, some of the existing sites of the pioneers of the Ivorian army are being rededicated and converted, equipped with construction machinery, the pioneers are being trained and given basic engineering training for rural dirt road construction. As part of our procurement services, we have procured and shipped to Côte d'Ivoire 86 trucks, ten wheel loaders, five mobile cranes, 15 bulldozers, seven crawler excavators, eleven tractors, six vibration rollers, five mobile workshop containers as well as five construction office containers, laboratory and storage containers, and other equipment, most of which comes from German manufacturers and suppliers, for the project over the last two years.

In the next step, the graduates will rehabilitate around 110 km of selected dirt roads under the guidance of GAUFF Engineering experts as "training on the job".

In addition to the improvement of the nationwide infrastructure and the new professional development opportunities for the graduates, the project makes an important contribution to the mutual acceptance and integration of the military into civil society.

The project, with a volume of 145 million euros, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024.