Road Construction Proving Tricky for Georgia's Millennium Challenge

Two years into the US government-funded Millennium Challenge Georgia program, observers are concerned that major delays and cost adjustments could prevent the development program from achieving one of its most ambitious goals.

A $102.2 million road repair project that will upgrade 300 kilometers of highway running between Tbilisi and Georgia's borders with Turkey and Armenia is the crown jewel of the Millennium Challenge Georgia (MCG) campaign. Construction on the project, which represents 35 percent of the MCG's overall $295.3 million budget, was slated to begin a year ago. But under the latest construction timetable, work won't get underway until later this spring at the earliest.

The first tender for a road repair company to do the work was cancelled last April. Ashtrom International, an Israeli construction company, won a second tender held last October. It intends to begin work either later in May or in June, and has set a new project completion date for the fall of 2011.

In an April interview with EurasiaNet, Lia Mamniashvili, MCG's then acting chief executive officer, cited the cancelled tender as the main reason for the delay. The time needed to work out complex engineering designs for roadwork in the affected Samtskhe-Javakheti region – one of Georgia's most remote areas – also played a role, she noted.

A local non-governmental organization monitoring the MCG fund, however, claims that the road project delay indicates that other problems exist as well. In a September 2007 report, the Economic Policy Research Center identified inconsistent project budgeting and analysis as an additional source of concern. "[When] international projects are delayed