DUBAI: Yemen has announced plans to build a $3.5 billion highway linking the southern port city of Aden to Saudi Arabia, starting work in the next three months on what will be one its biggest ever infrastructure projects.

The World Bank, which is contributing $134 million toward the 441-mile (710-km) road, has said it will help jump-start the struggling economy and boost confidence in Yemen’s political transition.

Militancy across the country has sapped Yemen’s economy, as oil and water resources decline. The road will pass through several conflict areas.

It was not completely clear how the state would afford the project.

A year after Yemen came close to economic collapse in 2011, it received $7.9 billion in aid pledges from foreign donors which it badly needs for budget spending as currency reserves shrink. The aid has been slow to arrive.

Yemen’s minister for public works, Omar Al-Korshomi, has signed pledges to start work on two stretches of the road in the center of the country, state news agency Saba said.

That 53-mile (85-km) of road will cost around $477 million, 80 percent of which will be covered by the Saudi Development Fund and the rest by the Yemeni government.

Indian engineering firm Punj Lloyd and a Chinese company will build the two sections, Saba said.

“Preparation and readying of equipment and contracting companies is under way to begin carrying out in earnest the strategic highway plan this September,” chief engineer Abdul Jabar Salem told the website of the defense ministry’s newspaper.

The World Bank said this month that the road would “play a vital role in the country’s transition by targeting the root causes of instability, such as lack of access to economic opportunities and poor national integration, and rebuilding the country’s social and economic base.”