Building Climate Resilience into Timor Leste’s Roads

The only thing worse than taking 5 hours to drive 106 km along  winding and often damaged mountainous roads, is the realization that having reached your destination you have to turn around and repeat the trip to get home. That was in the forefront of my mind as I sat in the very quiet town of Ainaro, south of the capital in Dili. The second thing I thought about was that we had to do a lot of work to help Timor Leste make their roads more resilient to the effects of climate: or more particular, water.

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Using SMS Messages to Improve Project Effectiveness

The SMS message was “Drainage is not being done properly in the village Achajur. Please fix.” While it was disturbing to hear that there were problems in one of the projects I was responsible for, at the same time I was very encouraged since this proved the value of an SMS-based system we developed to facilitate local residents advising on social, environmental or engineering issues on our project.