Development of a methodology to transfer road safety good practices in African countries

Africa is the worst performing continent in road safety and year after year the situation worsens. According to the WHO data there has been no progress in reducing the number of deaths from road traffic incidents in Africa between 2013 and 2016. To reverse this trend, it is essential to bear in mind that road safety problems in Africa should be preferably considered in their context, as well as the proposed solutions to address them. Towards this direction, the objective of this paper is to present the development of the Safer Africa Transferability Audit (STA). The proposed tool allows assessing whether the implementation of a given road safety intervention may face problems within one (or more) of the three domains of the Road Safety Space: society/culture, economy, and institutions. The methodology is based on five steps. The process started with selecting promising road safety good practices worldwide to transfer. Identify local stakeholders. Next, the Problems Priority Matrix (PPM) is assessed by the local stakeholders. Scores to be assigned to practice depend on the difficulty to transfer/adapt it to the receptor country. To design interventions suitable to the existing context, the total scores and a list of problems arisen from the PPM are analyzed. Thus, it will be indicated which immediate enabling actions are required to overcome legislative, regulatory, organizational, institutional, and other barriers that may prevent measures or actions from being implemented. To test the application of the proposed methodology, a pilot study was carried out in the following five African countries: Tunisia, Kenya, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and South Africa. However, only 14 responses were obtained from the five countries for all the pillars. Given the sample size and the distribution of respondents over countries, the full results of each country are not presented. Finally, the limitations and the next steps that should be taken to further develop the STA are presented.