The Chinese rehabilitated, expanded and did temporary fix on the Hargeisa-Mogadishu road but it was the Italians who built or paved the road in just few weeks. That was during the WW2 invasion of Somaliland by the Italians. They paved the road while invading at the same time. Very very fast. They built another one in the same weeks to Harar and Addis Ababa.
The Italians were super fast. They built slum village Addis Ababa in just 5 years from village to a modern city wale.
They had what was then slaved labour workers basically Italians who were up to no good. Instead of sending them to prisons, they forced them to do labors across their foreign territories.
In Ethiopia they had something like 200,000 workers. These Italians were master builders. Super efficient. They laid all the roads in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somali Republic still used to this day.
Here is example of their method (building road from Addis to Asmara in just 6 months). This road was about 688 miles and they had to build 1,864 bridges due to the elevations (Ethiopian/Eritrea highlands) then going down to lower elevations (Eritrean lowlands).
In Eri-Ethiopia, the Italians built about 6 major roads, almost 4,500 bridges, set up over 500 construction camps, labor reached over 120,000 workers (60,000 Italians), and almost 2,000 buildings to manage these roads one way or another. All in less than 5 years and they built crazy cities (Addis, Dire, Bahir Dar, Dessie, Asmara (this one took decades).
So to go back the Italians made the foundations and during the Kacaan, the Chinese renovated the roads.
The Sheikh road was built by the Chinese. It is impressive road and scenery.
