Under the Roads Program, SFD provides support for rural feeder roads. Feeder roads normally have a gravel surface and connect a community to a road maintained by the government ( a classified road). Rural feeder roads are seen as important to development of rural areas as they help rural people generate income through easier access to markets, can reduce the price of essential goods bought in the village, and improve access to health, education and other services by making travel to and from the village easier.

SFD support to feeder roads aims to ensure high quality. It should include all works that allow all-year use of the road and prevents blockages or erosion on road surfaces and slopes. SFD provides support may include the following types of works:

• Realignment of steep sections of feeder roads
• Construction of structures to improve water drainage using labor-intensive techniques.
• Carriage widening of feeder roads. However in many mountain areas a single lane is seen as the most suitable type of road
• Construction of paved roads using stones
• Improvements to road surfaces on selected stretches of roads using rock pavement or stones
• Stone pavement of market places and footpaths in poor urban neighbourhoods or areas exposed to flooding or which are located in historic sites

SFD does not support construction of large lengths of road that requires a lot of complicated road-building equipment, asphalting of roads, main roads or roads that connect districts headquarters. It does not support roads that will be converted to a higher grade of classified road, and roads that exceed a given cost per km or per head of benefiting population. SFD does not give financial support to regular road maintenance activities. This is the responsibility of the community.

SFD gets many applications for road projects and cannot support them all. To be supported a number of criteria must be met and to select from the large number of possible road projects that meet these criteria, SFD uses a scoring system to prioritise which roads should be supported.

The criteria that a road project must meet are:

• The beneficiaries must be poor
• There must be sufficient population to justify the cost & cost should not exceed a given limit per person
• Must be in remote rural locations
• Must improve access to services
• Must facilitate marketing or reduce prices of goods coming into the area
• Design of road should be simple and appropriate
• The beneficiary community must commit to a proportion of the cost and future maintenance

To priorities among the many road requests from poor areas that SFD receives that meet these criteria, applications are scored against the following:

• poverty levels (the higher the poverty level, the greater the score),
• the total population likely to benefit,
• current and future access to service facilities,
• current and future economic factors such as markets,
• remoteness,
• connectivity of nearby road network, cost per capita
• condition of the link road.