Used throughout South Africa as a design tool for civil engineers, locally developed computer software is now being put to work further afield in major regional infrastructural projects. As such, it is playing an important professional role in southern African development.

Two African neighbour states where the technology is being harnessed for this purpose are Tanzania and Botswana, where South African civil engineering software design is being employed in the design and construction of major road projects.

Among the advanced software being used in the road mapping and design is Civil Designer, developed by Cape-based engineering software house knowledge base. Initially developed to analyse and design sewage and stormwater networks, civil designer has been progressively developed and refined to form a suite of fully interactive design modules which combine to form an integrated data-gathering, drawing surface-modelling and design system.

Today it is in use by engineering consultancies, specialist engineers, municipalities, government and non-government bodies throughout the country in road and highway, sewer, stormwater and water reticulation systems design.

"It is one of our most frequently used - and most useful - road design tools," says du Bruyn Jonker of Kwezi V3 Engineers, an engineering consultancy which is currently involved in detailed survey and design work for two new highways in Tanzania and Botswana.

Jonker says the software's survey and terrain modelling module, which provides interactive earthworks design and calculations, has been especially useful in the preliminary design work on the two highways - a 98 m long road linking the towns of Mingoyo and Mbwemkulu in eastern Tanzania; and a 32 km long highway between Mahalapye and Kalamare in Botswana.

"We use civil designer from the start of each project," Jonker reports. "It is particularly user-friendly in doing surveys and obtaining and plotting data about terrain and other factors which we have to take into account, such as the position of geographical features, natural obstacles such as trees, or man-made obstructions such as electricity or telephone lines;" he concludes

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