Road Safety Capacity Building in Cameroon: Train-The-Trainers Approach

Road traffic fatalities varies significantly across high, medium and low-income countries. The lack of knowledge in road safety is one of the reasons for these differences. In African countries there are potential barriers to train adequately professionals, generally due to a lack of specialized training, training standardization, and funding. In that regard, one of the measures proposed in the African Road Safety Action Plan for 2021-2030 derived from the Strategic Directions is to strengthen the capacity of Road Safety stakeholders at the national and regional levels. Among expected cost/effective and sustainable solutions there is the train-the-trainers (TTT) approach, which is however not well documented in the transportation literature. The objective of this paper is to describe the TTT approach proposed in two projects in Cameroon (SaferAfrica and road safety programme for University of Bamenda). The training of trainers has two main objectives: (i) to inform (future) local trainers of the relevant body of knowledge that exists in the field of road safety, applicable to the local context, (ii) to provide (future) local trainers with the necessary tools to transfer this knowledge. Initially, once the Reference Group (RG) was created, a User Needs Analysis (UNA) was carried out to understand local conditions and needs in terms of teaching and research on road safety. Based on the findings collected on target audience needs and preferences, contents, methods, and learning outcomes of the courses on road safety were defined, as well as the research topics. Once the local trainers have been identified, the train-the-trainers (TTT) course was delivered and evaluated.