Ancient Japanese Paving Technology Reborn to Fix Modern Road Infrastructure
In the remote highlands of Meru, Kenya, seasonal downpours once left rural roads gutted with mud and potholes. Farmers found their produce stranded, and children often couldn’t make it to school on washed-out tracks.
Today, an unlikely saviour is turning these dirt pathways into all-weather roads. It’s neither heavy machinery nor high-tech asphalt, but an ancient Japanese road-building technique involving nothing more exotic than soil and sacks. This low-cost method, known as Do-Nou, is quietly engineering a revolution in community infrastructure.
Around the world, from East Africa to Asia, construction professionals are taking note as this “soil-packed bag” system breathes new life into neglected roads.
What Exactly Is Do-Nou Technology?
Do-Nou (Japanese for “wrapping soil in a bag”) is a century-old construction technique pioneered in Japan long before the advent of modern road equipment. At its core, the method is brilliantly simple: ordinary gunny sacks are filled with soil, sand, or gravel, then tightly sealed and laid down to reinforce weak spots in roads. Layer by layer, these soil-packed bags form a sturdy foundation or patch that can support surprisingly heavy loads.
In fact, each Do-Nou bag can bear up to 250 kN of force – roughly the weight of a 25-ton truck axle – once compacted and covered. This effectively creates a solid sub-base for unpaved roads, acting like a makeshift geotextile that distributes weight and prevents vehicles from sinking into soft ground.
U.S. Army engineer Lt. Sean Donahue described it as: “The Do-Nou is a labour intensive method that uses geo-textile materials (sand bags) and hand tools to create a solid sub-base for highly un-trafficable portions of dirt roads”.
The process involves identifying the worst road sections – those waterlogged gullies or craters that halt traffic – and excavating them a bit deeper. Workers then fill sturdy sacks (about 45×60 cm in size) with the available fill material (often the very soil from the site, or gravel if at hand). The bag’s open end is secured with twine, creating a compact module of earth. These modules are laid in rows inside the excavated section and compacted by hand tools or simple tampers, locking them tightly together.
For extra reinforcement, multiple layers of Do-Nou bags can be added, with a thin layer of soil or murram filling any gaps between bags before the next layer goes on. Finally, a top layer of gravel or soil (around 5 cm thick) is spread over the final layer of bags and compacted, both to create a smooth driving surface and to shield the bags from UV exposure and wear.
The result is a firm, resilient road section where there was once a quagmire.
A Low-Cost, High-Impact Solution
Construction professionals are often astonished by how such basic materials yield such durable results. The secret lies in soil mechanics: the bag fabric confines the soil, increasing its load-bearing capacity by preventing lateral spread. In essence, each sack acts as a modular building block, like a brick made of earth. By using locally available materials – old grain sacks and whatever fill is on-site – Do-Nou drastically cuts costs compared to conventional roadbuilding. There’s no need for expensive cement, steel, or heavy machinery; even compaction is done with manual labour. This makes the technique ideal for rural areas in developing countries where resources and road equipment are scarce.
Community Road Empowerment (CORE), a Japanese-founded NGO spreading this technology, notes several key advantages of Do-Nou: it’s cheap, sustainable, and easy to learn, and it uses only common tools and materials that villagers already have. Even semi-skilled locals can be trained to apply it on their own roads, meaning maintenance can continue long after engineers leave.
Durability is another pleasant surprise. Properly installed Do-Nou patches can withstand heavy trucks and buses without rutting, as long as the sacks remain covered and dry. In fact, beyond roads, packed soil bags have historically been used in Japan for flood control embankments and even to shore up building foundations. That same strength is now being harnessed to keep remote roads passable year-round. Engineers compare the technique to giving the road a localized “surgery” – spot-repairing the worst sections so that the whole route becomes usable. And unlike a quick fix of dumping stones into a pothole, a Do-Nou repair creates a semi-permanent improvement that can last years with minimal upkeep.
Field tests in Africa have found that roads reinforced with Do-Nou can last at least five years before needing major maintenance, even under regular traffic and rain, provided the community takes care of drainage.
Building Better Roads, One Bag at a Time in Kenya
The modern resurgence of Do-Nou began in Kenya over a decade ago and has since blossomed into a showcase of community-driven roadwork. In Meru County, Kenya, a project supported by the Japan Social Development Fund (JSDF) and the World Bank has trained local residents in this forgotten art of road maintenance. Implemented by CORE, the initiative tackled miles of impassable dirt roads that had isolated villages. The results have been nothing short of transformative.
Under the project, villagers and youth groups filled tens of thousands of bags with soil and rehabilitated 26 kilometres of local access roads, far exceeding initial targets. Over 60 kilometres of routes are now reliably passable during rains, benefiting more than 60,000 people in Meru who can reach markets, schools, and health clinics without drama. For local farmers, this means fresh produce can get to town even in the wet season; for students, it means a safe ride to class instead of a muddy trek.
“This road up ahead used to be very bad… We couldn’t even walk on it. When it rained, it would become slippery, with hills and valleys. We weren’t able to move forward,” recalled Faith Karimi, a Meru resident, describing the previous state of her village road. “But now, you have built us a road. It’s now okay, and we are very thankful.” Her sentiments are shared by thousands who have seen their daily lives change for the better.
The impact on the community has been revitalizing. Where there was once mud and frustration, now motorbikes zip along carrying goods and passengers, connecting communities to the broader economy. The project has sparked new economic activity along the repaired roads – 165 new businesses have sprung up, from produce stalls to motorcycle taxi services, taking advantage of the improved access. Travel times have plummeted; surveys show 37% of residents can now reach essential services or the main highway in under 15 minutes, a drastic improvement in mobility. School attendance is up as well – no longer are children stuck at home for weeks when the rains hit.
Perhaps most striking is the sense of ownership the community has gained. The locals didn’t just receive a new road; they built it themselves, learning skills in the process. The project trained some 1,250 community members (nearly half of them women) in road construction, and helped form over 50 micro-enterprises among the trainees. These range from small contracting groups that can maintain roads for a fee, to youth teams offering transport services. In effect, a dirt road that once symbolized isolation has become a corridor of opportunity.
From Youth Employment to Community Empowerment
Kenya’s success with Do-Nou set the stage for its export to other countries, particularly across Africa. The method’s reliance on manual labour isn’t a hinderance, it’s a feature. By design, Do-Nou projects create plenty of jobs for local residents, turning unemployed youth into the builders of their own infrastructure.
In The Gambia, for example, a 2018 initiative funded by Japan and implemented with the International Labour Organization used Do-Nou road works as a vehicle for youth employment and post-conflict recovery. Over 250 young Gambians were hired and trained to repair critical local roads using the soil-bag technique. Among them were 125 women, 30 returnees who had migrated abroad in search of work, and even 10 hearing-impaired individuals – a deliberate effort to include the most vulnerable groups. With guidance from Japanese experts and seasoned Kenyan technicians, these trainees restored a 1.2 km tourist boardwalk that had nearly collapsed, and a 2.5 km rural access road that used to flood every rainy season. The work was laborious at first – many youths had never done construction – but by filling and laying around 18,000 Do-Nou bags, they not only rebuilt the infrastructure but also gained a new trade.
The legacy of that Gambian project continues today. Once the international experts packed up, the newly skilled local teams kept on repairing roads on their own. Some ambitious graduates even started their own small construction businesses, applying their Do-Nou know-how to other community projects. One young entrepreneur, Sainabou Jammeh, became a minor celebrity after the project. She formed a road maintenance company and began winning local contracts. “I am no longer a job seeker, I am now a job creator,” she proudly told a development conference, highlighting how a simple road project changed her life’s trajectory. To ensure the skills take root, the method was also introduced into the curriculum of Gambia’s technical training institute, so future builders will learn bag-based road reinforcement as part of their education. Similar stories are emerging elsewhere: in Uganda, CORE’s programs have repaired over 5 kilometres of village roads and trained more than 2,600 residents in Do-Nou techniques as of 2022.
In Rwanda, the government is piloting the approach on feeder roads to connect farmers to markets. Even conflict-affected regions have seen a boost – in Cameroon, engineers from the U.S. Army used Do-Nou to help local forces stabilize supply routes prone to washouts. Each case underscores a common theme: empowering communities to fix their own infrastructure not only improves transport but also builds local skills and livelihoods.
Global Impact and the Road Ahead
What started as an old Japanese trick for road repair is now a global movement in appropriate technology. Over the past decade, the NGO CORE and partners have introduced Do-Nou road building to 29 countries worldwide, from Asia to Latin America and across Africa. They have trained tens of thousands of people – often villagers with little formal education – to be “road engineers” in their own right.
This approach aligns perfectly with a shift in international development philosophy: focusing on human-centred, community-led solutions. Rather than donating expensive equipment or sending large construction crews, donors like Japan’s JSDF invest in teaching people how to solve their own problems with the resources at hand. The effect is twofold: vital infrastructure gets built or restored, and local people gain jobs, confidence, and a stake in maintaining the improvements. In the words of one Meru resident, the road was “not built for us, but with us,” and that has made all the difference.
Industry experts see tremendous potential for scaling up Do-Nou technology in other parts of the world. Regions with weak soils, heavy rainfall, or budget constraints can especially benefit. For instance, parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, where communities are scattered and roads are frequently wrecked by monsoons, could adopt this method to keep routes open. Importantly, Do-Nou is not meant to replace modern highways – it’s a pragmatic solution for rural feeder roads and disaster recovery, where a bit of muscle and ingenuity can outperform a pricey machine.
Policymakers are taking note: some nations are incorporating Do-Nou into their rural road maintenance policies, and engineering faculties are examining it as a form of localized geotextile application. Ongoing projects backed by international agencies are now bringing the technique to new locales (such as a current community road effort in Mauritania and other Sahel countries) to create jobs and improve climate resilience.
As this humble soil-bag innovation spreads, it carries with it more than just infrastructure gains. It demonstrates a powerful principle – that sometimes the old, simple ideas can solve modern problems in a sustainable way. By marrying traditional knowledge with community ownership, Do-Nou technology is paving more than roads; it’s paving the way for a new mindset in construction and development.
Around the world, previously isolated communities are now connected, entrepreneurs are emerging from among unemployed youth, and vital services are within reach – all thanks to a down-to-earth technique literally pulled from the ground. In an age of smart cities and high-tech construction, the global success of Do-Nou is a reminder that innovation isn’t always about reinventing the wheel; sometimes, it’s about rediscovering the road.
