Worksdepartment is one of the council’s departments which deal with construction, rehabilitation and maintenance of roads and bridges within the council jurisdiction. Also the department is responsible for supervising (sometimes designing) construction of all public buildings and supervising maintenance of council’s Motor vehicles. Works department bears a big role in improving the economy of the society and council at large as it is known that the good roads infrastructure plays a large role in improving economy by simplifying transportation of what the society produce. Currently, the council has a road network consist of 709.2 km, of which 96 km are gravel roads and 613kms are earth roads. These are roads which have been maintained by the council so far. The roads which are passable throughout the year are 354 km. equal to 49.9% of the road network. The rest 355.2km are only passable in dry season. The works department has been maintaining the current existing roads each year. The fund for road maintenance is obtained from central government through Roads Fund. The council also strives to acquire funds from various development partners. In 2012/2013 the council obtained funds from Tanzania-Japanese Food Aid Counterpart. The standard of maintenance which the council does is earth and gravel standard, which necessitate the roads to be maintained every year. However, these funds are not sufficient to maintain the whole road network. The department has been allocating these funds by considering the priority and the severity of damages on it at a time. However, in the interior of the council there are so many roads which have not been maintained by the council that makes council road network. These roads are still poorly maintained by the community.
The department, as the part of the Council also has gone through challenge of council split from the former Njombe District Council which took place between 2012 and 2013, resulting the establishment of Makambako Town Council and Wanging’ombe District Council. This lead to reduction of council maintained road network, working equipments and staff. The department is facing some problems in implementing its duties: Insufficient fund to maintain the road network, shortage of transport facilities for supervising road maintenance, few staff, shortage of working equipments, existing of impassable roads in the network, low community participation in preserving and maintain the roads and overloaded trucks which damage the district roads.
613 km of earth roads require upgrading to at least gravel standard, 40km of gravel roads require major rehabilitation.
