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Kabul Residents Enjoy Better Mobility and Access to Services After Road Upgrades
KABUL CITY – Seventy-year-old Nematullah Sadat makes his way down a recently paved street in Qala-e-Fathullah neighborhood in Kabul city’s district 10. He is heading home after a short trip to buy fresh bread. It’s an enjoyable stroll today, but Nematullah says this was not always the case. In the past, street conditions sometimes kept him from reaching the main road – even though it is just 500 meters away.
“When my family first moved here four years ago, the condition of the street was awful,” he says. “Because of flooding, mud, and litter, the road was impassable some of the time and unpleasant to pass all the time. The smell was unbearable. It was very inconvenient to get anywhere, especially for the children to get to school.”
Now, Nematullah is able to come and go as he pleases. Kabul Municipality paved the neighborhood street in 2017 through the Kabul Municipal Development Program (KMDP).
Altogether the municipality has paved 38 streets, totaling over 9 kilometers (km) of roadway, in the Qala-e-Fathullah and Taimani neighborhoods.
Housewife Freshta, 40, who lives in Qala-e-Fathullah, says, “On these new streets, there is much less dust and no mud or puddles of water. I feel like I am walking in a whole new city!”
Zalmay Latifi, 51, chairperson of the Qala-e-Fathullah Community Development Council, agrees that this and other streets in the neighborhood were in such poor state that they were not passable for most people. “Children and women had an especially difficult time getting around,” he says, “but as you can see now, this street is immaculate after Kabul Municipality paved it.”
Student Kazem Latifi, 13, a 7th grader at Azmoon High School, says he’s happy to go to school. “I used to go to school with wet feet or covered in mud because of the street. I felt embarrassed about the mud stains on my clothes and I often got sick from wearing wet clothes,” he says. “But now, my uniform stays clean and my health is better. I like going to school because now it just takes 15 minutes instead of 25 minutes and the extra 10 minutes I can spend with my friends.”
The elderly, too, had difficulties. “I used to see old people stuck in places they couldn’t pass on the road,” Zalmay Latifi says, “I would have to take them in my car just to get them to the main road. Now everyone benefits from the newly paved street.”
The upgrade was completed in November 2017 after eight months of work, which included building sidewalks and drainage. The KMDP project has directly benefited over 5,000 people in Qala-e-Fathullah and Taimani neighborhoods. Qala-e-Fathullah community members volunteered their own resources to the neighborhood as part of the initiative, building small footbridges over the drainage, installing lamps by doorways, and planting trees.
