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Lafarge agrees to provide resources for roads rehabilitation

Business
LAFARGE Cement Zimbabwe has agreed to provide some of their resources, mainly in technical expertise, to try and help in the rehabilitation of the country’s road infrastructure.

LAFARGE Cement Zimbabwe has agreed to provide some of their resources, mainly in technical expertise, to try and help in the rehabilitation of the country’s road infrastructure.

BY BUSINESS REPORTER

“Lafarge Cement Zimbabwe agreed and promised to avail some resources available from LafargeHolcim Group especially on roads to try and address some of the needs identified,” the cement manufacturer said on Tuesday at a workshop in the capital.

It is estimated that more than $5 billion is required to rehabilitate the road infrastructure in the country.

Lafarge Cement Zimbabwe is a subsidiary of the LafargeHolcim group, which is headquartered in Switzerland.

The company is holding a three-day roads capacity building workshop, which ends today.

The workshop was part of an initiative to provide newer technologies to rehabilitate the road infrastructure in the country.

To that effect, Lafarge brought four of their top researchers from the LafargeHolcim research and development department to interact with stakeholders in the road sector.

The workshop was held to identify key areas to focus the rehabilitation of roads initiative, which mainly includes offering technical expertise.

These areas had to deal with a skills transfer in road design, rehabilitation and materials selection and treatment, technology transfer in terms of international best practice, information sharing on the current international standards to road construction, and networking.

One of the researchers, Eugen Florescu, said there was need to make concrete roads, as they required less maintenance and lasted longer than conventional roads.

An expert from the Transport ministry, who refused to be named, said the problem with the current road structure was financing.

“Financing has really been a problem for the regular maintenance of our roads. The benefit of using concrete roads is that they last longer. With typical roads, we have to reseal the roads (a method used as to protect the foundations of the road) after every seven to 10 years. However, building concrete roads allows more time to go by before having to reseal the road, which is cheaper in that sense,” the expert said.

Florescu said the way to build better concrete roads was having stronger mixtures that are obtained by mixing aggregates with hydraulic binders such as cement, HRB, slag, fly ash and a reduced amount of water.

LafargeHolcim has operations in more than 90 countries and employs 115 000 employees worldwide.