Across district and municipal road networks in Ghana, maintenance financing is consistently the first casualty of budget pressure, and periodic resurfacing or reconstruction the eventual, considerably more expensive, consequence. A road maintained on schedule costs a fraction of one rebuilt after it has failed.
Our position: municipal and district assemblies should be required to ring-fence a fixed minimum share of road-fund allocations specifically for preventive maintenance — routine resealing, drainage clearance, and pothole repair — separate from, and protected against reallocation into, capital construction budgets. Pairing this with a simple public dashboard showing planned versus completed maintenance activity per district would also make it far harder for maintenance funds to be quietly diverted, since the gap between plan and delivery would be visible to the communities affected by it.
This is a modest administrative change with an outsized effect on total lifecycle cost — the kind of directive that rarely makes headlines but consistently saves money over a ten-year horizon.