The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has approved a $150m loan to Peru to support a major road maintenance and improvement programme.

The loan is expected to help reduce the country’s $900m financing gap for 2009–2012, in its programme to improve the 24,000km road network through 12 macro-projects to be carried out by public-private partnerships.

The IDB loan will go towards the $946.2m Highway Transport Sector Programme to build road pavements. Nearly half of Peru’s roads are currently unpaved.

The programme targets doubling the good-conditioned roads to 10,000km as well as reducing the poor-conditioned roads by 62% to 4,262km by the year 2013.