On a June morning in 2002, Maytas Bernal de Huillcas rose at 4:30 a.m. to prepare a day’s worth of meals for her four children. At that hour the temperature was still below freezing in her village of Ccorcca Ayllu, located some 14,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains near Cusco, Peru.

Leaving her children with a neighbor who would later take them to the village school, Bernal walked for two hours to a rendezvous point with a road maintenance crew run by a local cooperative known as the Asociación Vial de Ccorcca. The cooperative receives a fixed monthly fee from the government to maintain a 30-kilometer stretch of dirt and gravel road that provides the only connection between 10 indigenous Quechua villages in the Ccorcca district and the outside world.

By 8 a.m. Bernal and the crew were hard at work on a portion of the road that is carved into the side of a spectacular gorge. They used shovels, pick-axes and wheelbarrows to shore up the edges of a sharp curve with crushed stone. The work was exhausting and paid only 10 soles per day (around US$3), but Bernal—who was the only woman among nine men—was happy to have it. The pay was twice as much as local villagers offer each other for a day’s labor on one of the ubiquitous potato fields that serve as the main source of subsistence in this severely impoverished region.

In fact, a place on the road crew is so coveted that the cooperative has devised a system by which villagers are awarded two-week stints on the crew based on merit and need. “We give priority to those who have a good record of showing up for faenas,” says Sergio Jordán Quispe, president of the Asociación Vial. He is referring to the ancient Quechua practice of communal labor in which villagers set aside days to work on collectively owned farmland or build and maintain facilities such as schools. Jordán says the cooperative also favors individuals who are known to have special financial needs. Bernal, for example, is a widow, and working on the road crew several times a year gives her much-needed income to care for her children.

The old and the new. This fusion of traditional communal labor and the modern imperatives of road maintenance is one of the hallmarks of Peru’s Caminos Rurales (rural roads) Program. Launched in 1996 and partly financed with a $90 million IDB loan, the program’s first phase has built or refurbished more than 11,000 kilometers of roads leading to remote villages in Peru’s Andean highlands. The roads have revolutionized the lives of several million peasants who were previously cut off from public services, schools, hospitals and markets.

The district of Ccorcca was typical in this regard. Though only 30 kilometers from Cusco, a city of 200,000 with all modern amenities, the 3,000 or so villagers who live around Ccorcca might as well have been 500 kilometers away. The old dirt track leading to Cusco was so rough that it could take six hours for a villager to reach the city on a mule, and even longer during the rainy season. “Before it was refurbished [in the late 1990s], that road was our via crucis,” jokes Julián Sotomayor, mayor of Ccorcca. Now, pickup trucks, cars and buses make the 45-minute trip to Cusco on an almost daily basis. Villagers can take alpaca textiles or cash crops directly to large markets, see the dentist, go to court, or simply visit a relative—all things once considered a luxury.

The road is in excellent condition, despite the wear inflicted by heavy garbage trucks from Cusco that use the lower stretch on the way to a new landfill. The reason, quite simply, is that villagers have an interest in keeping their trips to town as short and safe as possible. Since nearly all the working-age adults in Ccorcca have had a turn on the road crew at some time, they have developed a sort of preventive maintenance culture, according to Jordán. The condition of the road is a source of local pride, and the quality of the cooperative’s work is under constant scrutiny.

Money well spent. This arrangement stands in stark contrast to the traditional rural road program, in which maintenance tends to be the weakest link. When distant municipal or provincial governments control maintenance resources and road crews, it can be difficult for local communities to ensure that work is performed on a timely basis and that funds are spent efficiently. Indeed, corruption and mismanagement have become almost synonymous with public roads in some Latin American countries.

Sergio Jordán Quispe.

In order to prevent these abuses, the Caminos Rurales Program helped to establish more than 400 road maintenance microenterprises like the one in Ccorcca. Although they are supervised by municipal authorities and work on the basis of technical plans developed by the government, these microenterprises receive maintenance funds directly and are entirely responsible for results. In effect, the microenterprises are accountable to both the government and the community.

In Ccorcca, this accountability is enforced during weekly “town hall” meetings that are held on Saturdays in the local municipal building. At each meeting, according to Jordán, the Asociación Vial reports on the state of its finances, announces who will be given two-week slots on the crew, and explains what portions of the road have been worked on. The villagers are not shy about questioning the cooperative’s decisions, says Jordán, but he adds that “we’ve gained people’s confidence by showing them what we are doing and how the money is being spent.” Ccorcca Mayor Sotomayor agrees: “This is the most concrete way of organizing things,” he says, “because everything is constantly being watched over by the community.”

The road crew at work.

In Ccorcca, more than in other districts, this virtuous cycle of cooperation and accountability has yielded additional fruits. When it became part of the Caminos Rurales Program in 1996, the Asociación Vial decided to put a fixed percentage of its earnings into a savings account with the goal of eventually investing in a productive enterprise that could generate jobs and income for Ccorcca’s citizens. During the first five years of the Caminos Rurales Program, the Asociación Vial managed to save $20,000 –a huge sum in a community where most people subsist on a few hundred dollars a year. Jordán said the cooperative came under pressure to pay out more of its earnings in wages, but frequent “town hall” discussions of the issue always ended in support of saving. Finally, earlier this year, the cooperative voted to use around three-fourths of its savings to purchase 110 hectares of prime pastureland as the first step in starting a dairy farm. Instead of driving all the way to Cusco to get milk and cheese, people will soon be able to buy it locally—an important gain in an area where many people have protein-deficient diets.

“The entire community knew about the cooperative’s decision to buy that land,” recalls Sotomayor, “and we congratulated them!”

See links at right to learn about the second phase of the Caminos Rurales program.