| dc.description.abstract | The government of Uganda has put in place plans for road development and maintenance and has
improved on its budget allocations in order to boost tourism, agriculture and mining among others.
However, there is an upward trend in the prices of road construction, reconstruction, rehabilitation
and maintenance in Uganda which is partly due to lack of a specific method of measurement used
on road construction projects and there has been no in depth knowledge about how the different
contractors come up with the road construction unit rate prices, the basis for those rates and which
techniques they use to analyze the unit rates.
This study examined the constituents of unit cost prices of key components on road construction
projects in Uganda. These included materials, labour and equipment as the main cost drivers on
road construction projects from the literature review. The main objective was to find out the
constituents of the unit rate prices quoted by different contractors on road construction projects
and how they arrive at that rate. The study was completed in the central region of Uganda
considering results from different road construction contractors in different companies which were
purposively sampled. Data was collected using interviews and checklists and analyzed using
correlations, regression and descriptive analysis. This entailed derivation of unit rates for
individual inputs of pavement layers based on recommendations of the MoWT specifications and
the prevailing market prices. Contractors’ rates were obtained from the leading implementers of
both development and rehabilitation road projects. A comparative analysis was done to establish
whether there were significant differences between the derived and contractors’ rates for the
different classifications of contractors.
The findings indicated that there was a strong relationship between the derived and contractors’
rates with a high correlation coefficient of 0.973. The study also shows that the rates of selected
items of work provided by the contractors were higher than the derived rates. This was attributed
to the different percentages of overheads and profits, project location and conditions of contract
attached to work items by different contractors. Future studies should be carried out to derive unit
rates for other road construction activities such as earthworks, and ancillary works focusing on
packaging projects according to type, size, duration of construction and location in order to provide
insights that influence the bid prices. | en_US |
