More than US $70m for development projects

Loan agreements granting Swaziland more than US $70 million for two development projects were signed by the African Development Bank (ADB) in Uganda this week. A major portion of the money - about $57.4 million - will be used to develop an 11 km stretch of the bypass road from the commercial hub of Manzini in the centre of the country to Mbabane, the capital, and then to the border town of Ngwenya in northwestern Swaziland. Phase 1 of the project, completed last year, covered 14.3 km between Ngwenya and Mbabane, but according to the ADB, there is a need to upgrade the entire road from Manzini to Ngwenya to a dual carriageway to eliminate transport bottlenecks. The second loan, amounting to 9.31 million Units of Account (UA), about $13.5 million, will finance the lower Usuthu smallholder irrigation project in the fertile lowlands of central Swaziland, where the Usuthu river joins other waterways to form the Maputo River at the Mozambican border. This project includes three dams with irrigation infrastructure that will provide water to large-scale irrigation schemes for smallholders producing mainly sugar. According to the ADB, the project will help to transform subsistence level farmers into small-scale commercial farmers, and improve the lives of the rural poor by increasing household incomes, thus enhancing food security and access to social and health infrastructure. The project will also provide credit funds to enable the smallholder farmers to intensify and diversify their agricultural production, and expand existing market linkages with the private sector.