Infrastructure

Poverty in Sarawak for the rural folks does not just cover basic rights of water and electricity, but also a severe deficiency in telecommunication services or transportation works.

Besides access to piped water, electricity and provision of roads, other infrastructure like telecommunication, transportation and communal structures are lagging behind in rural areas of Sabah and Sarawak.

In Sarawak, the road network is still underdeveloped and, unlike Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia, there is no rail network passing through rural areas and connecting the main towns. For this reason, river transportation is the only mean of transportation in and out of rural areas, providing connectivity to larger towns and cities for these communities in Sarawak. Yet the current river transportation system leaves little to be desired and sights of run-down communal structures like jetties and bridges are not uncommon.

Impian Sarawak has completed two jetty refurbishments and two bridges, greatly improving the safety of the villagers who rely on these basic infrastructures to go about their daily lives.

We have also upgraded a dilapidated Rumah Gawai; a community hall within a Bidayuh village in Kampung Serikin that could not be used for the Gawai celebrations for the past few years due to the unsafe structure and helped built a single-storey house for a neglected single mother of three children who, for the past six years stayed in a shack she built with her own bare hands, using whatever materials and scraps she could find before help was rendered to her.