The rural access index (RAI) estimates accompanying the Sustainable Development Report by the SDSN SDG Transformation Center suggests that nine out of ten rural residents in Asia and the Pacific have access to all-season roads.¹ The RAI measures what share of a country's rural population lives within two kilometers of a road that stays open all year. That single figure, tracked worldwide as Sustainable Development Goal indicator 9.1.1, has become one of the most closely watched signals of rural access anywhere. However, measuring this index is challenging, and institutions are providing differing estimates, which are driven by differences in input data and methodologies.

How does RAI get measured?

The World Bank introduced the concept of Rural Access Index in 2006.² Early rounds leaned on national road inventories and household surveys, compiled country by country, with no shared global road map underneath them. Coverage stayed thin for over a decade; by around 2020, estimates have existed for various countries. The methodology then evolved to focus on geospatial analysis utilizing rural population distribution, road infrastructure, and road quality datasets. In 2019, the Research for Community Access Partnership, TRL, and Azavea³ integrated OpenStreetMap road data with WorldPop population grids and the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project's urban masks to create the first comprehensive global RAI approach. It suggested that 75% of the rural population in the region had access to all-season roads.⁴

The World Bank ran a parallel exercise, testing three separate assumptions about which roads to count i.e. primary roads only, primary plus secondary and tertiary roads, and every mapped road including tracks to largely to test how sensitive the index is to a single design choice.⁵ By 2022, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) had built an independent model of its own, later refined with Microsoft's building-footprint and road-pavement analysis. In 2023, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University released their own estimates based on readily available open data, to contribute towards addressing coverage gaps (temporal and geographical).⁶

These estimates provide different pictures of rural access to all-season roads. This may be due to assumptions on various parameters such as where people live, the spatial distribution of the road network, and road passability, as well as differences in methodologies.⁷ Thus, several parameters matter. OpenStreetMap coverage is dense in some countries and sparse in others, and a road missing from the map is treated as a road that does not exist. Second is the road-condition threshold. Here some models make different assumptions and proxy accessibility factors. Third is the population grid i.e., WorldPop, national census figures, and other modelled population surfaces disagree on exactly where rural residents live. Fourth is the urban-rural separation where small shifts in how a settlement boundary is drawn move large numbers of people into or out of the rural denominator entirely.

Different Methods, Different RAI Results

Weighting these geospatial estimates by each country’s rural population, using data compiled in the Asian Transport Observatory’s National Database, yields an estimated regional Rural Access Index of 72%–75% in 2019.⁸ In comparison, SDSN’s national RAI estimates yield a weighted average of 82% for the year 2022.⁹

Holding the lens steady: what has actually changed?

None of these considerations makes the RAI inherently unreliable. It only means a valid comparison must stay inside one methodology to understand the progress and gaps. Thus, held to a single lens i.e., the SDSN has updated modelled estimates for the period 2023 to 2026. We note that there is a significant improvement estimated already for 2023, wherein the population weighted regional average had increased to 92% (a 10-percentage point increase from the previous year). In population terms, the number of people without access to all-season roads was estimated to have reduced from more than 415 million in 2022 to less than 175 million in 2023. The regional average has stayed relatively stable up to 2026, estimated at 93%. The total rural population with access to all-season roads, is estimated to have been at around 2 billion (2023-2026). We note that the total estimated rural population has decreased by 2 percent between the said period.

Among the 48 economies with RAI estimates for both 2023 and 2026, SDSN’s modeled estimates increased in only 19. The significant estimated declines in the Rural Access Index are particularly notable among low- and lower-middle-income economies. Several of the largest reductions are observed in economies where rural access was already comparatively limited. In contrast, most high-income economies remained close to universal rural access, highlighting the persistent—and potentially widening—income-related disparity in rural connectivity.

The economies showing the largest gains between the 2023 and 2026 Sustainable Development Report estimates—Pakistan, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—have been undertaking road-sector policies or investments that could plausibly have resulted in increased coverage, or re-classification of road infrastructure information in the underlying input datasets. Although the respective contributions of the policies and investments cannot be determined with certaintly, the developments remain notable.

In Pakistan, the World Bank-financed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Rural Accessibility Project is upgrading about 650 kilometers of rural roads to provide more reliable, year-round access to schools, health facilities, markets, and provincial centers.¹⁰ In 2020, the Naya Pakistan-Easy Destinations, Rural Access Program was launched, covering 154 rural roads with a combined length of 1,076 kilometers.¹¹

In Uzbekistan, the Obod Qishloq—or “Prosperous Village”—program planned approximately 3,000 kilometers of road repairs in 386 villages in 2018. Its 2019 program subsequently provided for the repair and reconstruction of 5,476 kilometers of regional roads and internal village streets.¹² In 2023, ADB approved a $240 million project to improve around 700 kilometers of local and inter-farm roads in 12 regions and Karakalpakstan, aligned with the country’s Rural Road Strategy 2035 and National Development Strategy 2030.¹³ In Kazakhstan, there are major projects (connectivity-focused) that have been developing in the recent past. ADB approved (2024) financing to reconstruct 208 kilometers of the Kyzylorda–Zhezkazgan road as a climate-resilient route providing all-weather access,¹⁴ while the World Bank–AIIB Transport Resilience and Connectivity Enhancement project targets sections between Zhezkazgan and Karagandy and explicitly identifies improved access to services and employment for communities in the Ulytau and Karagandy regions.¹⁵

Turkmenistan established a dedicated State Agency for Road Construction Management in February 2022, and official reporting points to major highway and bridge construction.¹⁶

In Iran (Islamic Republic of), an administrative reform was realized in 2019 that transferred responsibility for the construction and development of rural roads—together with the associated functions, personnel, organizational structures, and budgets—to the Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization. The government then launched the national ABRAR initiative, initially targeting the construction, completion, rehabilitation of priority rural roads. The government's 2024/25 national budget directed support toward rural connectivity, allocating 49% to the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development for paving roads—including rural and nomadic roads—and 20% to the Housing Foundation for village upgrading and paving.¹⁷

Such developments are also observable from a broader regional emphasis on rural and local-road access. India approved PMGSY-IV in September 2024 to provide 62,500 kilometers of all-weather roads to 25,000 previously unconnected habitations.¹⁸ Indonesia’s Presidential Instruction No. 3 of 2023 created a national mechanism to accelerate improvements to provincial, regency, and city roads and increase regional-road stability and connectivity.¹⁹

While these initiatives represent important progress toward improving rural access to all-season roads, they do not necessarily account for the changes observed in the RAI estimates discussed in this piece. At the current pace of improvement based on the RAI numbers, we estimate that around 115 million rural residents in the region could still lack access by 2030, underscoring the need to accelerate progress.