JICA National Road 1 (NR 1) Project

JICA’s rehabilitation of NR 1 consisted of five stages conducted between 2005 and 2018. The first three stages improved two bridges and a road between Neak Loueng ferry port and Niroth Pagoda. To reduce transport congestion, Stage 4 expanded the first four km of NR 1 within the heavily trafficked Phnom Penh City to four lanes.

The last stages, dubbed the “National Road 1 Urban Section” in a JICA press release, were created during the detailed design study for Stage 4. A change in the design of the Asphalt Concrete (AC) for 450 m of Stage 4’s four km-stretch raised construction costs by about USD $2 million and required the signing of a new grant agreement, thus creating a fifth stage.

Table 1: JICA National Road 1 Projects

The funding for all five stages of NR 1 rehabilitation was provided via a grant from the government of Japan, although it remains unclear which financial institution provided the grant. Because the funds were provided as a grant, Cambodia has no requirement to pay back the assistance (unlike the Chinese cases examined that involved concessionary or non-concessionary lending). Meanwhile, the financial support for Stages 1, 2, and 3 are listed as “fully tied” in the ODA database reports. While it is not explicitly explained what “fully tied” entails in this case, it is assumed to fall under OECD’s definition of the term, which states that procurement is limited to donor country companies. Conversely, the financial support for Stage 4 and the Urban Section is listed as untied. This would be consistent with the overall development of JICA policy, which has gradually shifted away from tied aid.

While the CDC’s ODA database reports categorize the project as supporting the public sector, the annual budget listed was not shared with the RGC nor was a three-year draft plan shared with relevant Cambodian counterparts for Stages 1, 2, 3, and the Urban Section. The budgets and plans were only shared for Stage 4. Meanwhile, all five stages of the project did not use the government’s procurement system or financial management system (including the budgeting execution system, financial reporting system, or auditing system).

Project Transparency Gaps

In general, JICA’s transparency on the NR 1 project is more robust than the BRI projects examined in Cambodia’s series of case studies. Nonetheless, its transparency efforts could still be strengthened.

Like other ODA projects in Cambodia, the research team could find dates, budgets, and grant details using the CDC’s ODA database. JICA also has an ODA database, although it contains no documents regarding NR 1. Only 27 Cambodia-Japan ODA projects from 1969-2020 are listed in the JICA database, compared to 512 from 2008-2020 in CDC’s database. It is unclear why only a small portion of JICA’s ODA projects in Cambodia are listed. JICA also has a database for evaluation reports of its projects, but while the database had evaluation reports dating to 2005 (the year the first phase of NR 1 was approved), there are also no reports for NR 1.

The project’s press releases are only dated from 2012 onward, so the website does not include information on the first three stages of the project, which were approved prior to 2012. Yet although JICA’s publicly available material did not contain specific information, the office was willing to provide some details upon request.

Availability of Environmental Impact Assessment

The project’s feasibility studies found no substantial or irreversible adverse environmental and social impacts arising from the project, and recommended its implementation, stating that IEIA had a similar conclusion. However, this IEIA does not seem to be publicly available, and there do not seem to be any other independent assessments of the project’s projected or actual environmental impacts.

To capture different practices, quality and level of transparency, researchers are asked to answer six related questions for each data point. 1 point is assigned for each question to which the answer is “yes.” Each data point therefore has a total score between 0 and 6, where “0” means no information was publicly available at the time of research (not transparent) and “6” means full transparency.