Developing Safe System Projects in Africa

When dealing with road safety in Africa, one should bear in mind that road safety problems in Africa must be seen in their own context as the solutions proposed to address them. While it is relevant to take into account international good practices, African stakeholders should become owners of the interventions addressing their problems and take the responsibility for developing and implementing the appropriate solutions, taking advantage of suitable technical assistance, if needed. Based on these considerations, in this paper a presentation is made of the process used in the European research project "SaferAfrica - Innovating dialogue and problems appraisal for a safer Africa" to develop Safe System road safety intervention proposals for Africa. SaferAfrica aims at supporting policy makers and stakeholders with evidence on critical risk factors, related actions and good practices drawn from high quality data and knowledge. This project also serves as a platform to foster effective cooperation in road safety and to propose possible next road safety steps and identify possible funding sources in those countries were capacity review is carried out. In the project, road safety and traffic management capacity reviews at the country level were carried out in four countries (Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and Kenya), following the World Bank guidelines. After conducting such a capacity review, these guidelines recommend the preparation and implementation of Safe System projects, “stand-alone, multisector initiatives targeting high-risk corridors and areas, with outcomes large enough to be reliably measured.” In SaferAfrica, this approach aims at facilitating the implementation of Safe System projects in the considered countries, by identifying detailed short-term improvement plans, and producing contextualized Terms of Reference for a number of interventions per selected country. These interventions are remedial in nature, they address high-priority concerns and demonstrate the viability of high potential gains within current administrative and legislative frameworks. In order to design interventions suitable to the existing context, a transferability assessment tool is adopted within a “participative” process, involving all possible interested parties, from the institutions to NGOs. The tool will indicate which immediate enabling actions are required to overcome legislative, regulatory, organisational, institutional and other barriers that may prevent measures or actions from being implemented. Results from the process are presented and discussed.