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Reconnecting the people of Mogila – a new EU project to help rebuild the flood-hit roads of Pelagonija

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North Macedonia
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UNDP
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The flash floods that hit the country early last year dealt a devastating blow to villagers in the rural Municipality of Mogila, forcing evacuations and causing mudslides that have cut local people off from the towns of Prilep and Bitola.

Situated in the heart of the Pelagonija region in the far south of the country, the Municipality of Mogila experienced record flood-levels at the end of January 2015, then again in February and early March.

Many local houses, as well as schools, agricultural land and electrical infrastructure, were severely affected by the floods. And the mud left behind in the wake of the floods has cut off the roads connecting the villages of the municipality with the two main urban centres of the region—the towns of Prilep and Bitola.

“It was a flood of epic proportions—a real catastrophe!” says Trajan Daraliovski, an 80-year old resident of Mogila. “Strong winds and heavy rainfall caused the Crna Reka and Shemnica rivers to overflow and the water entered everywhere, including in our homes and schools. I don’t remember anything like it ever happening before.”

The floods caused major damage to the local economy, with businesses hit hard by the closure of roads over several months. “The Municipality of Mogila produces one-tenth of all the tobacco produced in the country,” explains the mayor of Mogila, Stevce Pivkovski. “The tobacco was devastated by flash floods, as were most of the sunflower fields. The local people here are hard-working and they know how to restore their businesses, but first it is essential to restore local roads to enable people to work and produce again.”

However, restoring the roads is an expensive task and the budget of this rural municipality is low, with no factories or big companies to contribute to municipal revenues. As a consequence, the local authorities have not been able to raise enough funds to undertake the desperately needed reconstruction of the local road network.

“The road infrastructure has suffered major damage and our municipality has been cut off from the rest of the world,” says Zorance Kekovski, a local councillor. “Children’s education has been interrupted and people are still having to travel an extra thirty kilometres just to get to work and school and the nearest hospital.”

Against this background of increasing concerns about the local economy, new worries have emerged about poor water quality and the risk of disease. Water from wells in seven villages in the municipality has been found to be contaminated, and access to safe drinking water has been interrupted.

And the list of problems does not end there. According to Jasmina Gulevska, President of the municipality’s Commission for Gender Equality, what worries local parents most is that hundreds of children have been unable to attend school for several months. “One school was completely destroyed and two were partially flooded,” says Jasmina. “Life has become very difficult. For older people, access to hospitals is nearly impossible.”

An end in sight

Help is now at hand for the people of Mogila municipality, however, as the EU has stepped in to answer Pelagonija’s call for aid to cope with the consequences of the floods.

The European Union Flood Recovery Programme approved a multi-million-euro project to help the country’s efforts to recover and upgrade the critical transport infrastructure in the regions most affected by floods, including the villages in the Municipality of Mogila.

The local roads connecting the villages to Prilep and Bitola will be restored within a year. And in line with the principle of ‘building back better’, the project will rebuild the road infrastructure in accordance with improved design standards that will make it much more resilient to flooding.

The project in the Municipality of Mogila is one of eight transport-related projects in the country funded by the EU Flood Recovery Programme. All of the projects will be implemented by the United Nations Development Prorgamme (UNDP) in partnership with the Secretariat for European Integration, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Economy, the Ministry of Transport and Communications, the Public Enterprise for State Roads and the local governments of the affected municipalities.