Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire — Road traffic injuries claim more than 1.2 million lives each year worldwide and have a significant impact on health and development.
Africa takes the highest share of the road crash burden relative to its low level of motorization and road network density. The characteristics of road crash in the region signifies that over 75% of the casualties are of productive age between 16-65 years; and the vulnerable road users, which include pedestrians, cycle riders and motorcycle riders, constitute over 65% of the deaths. These figures clearly indicate the direct linkage and the impact of road crash in worsening poverty in Africa. The regional features such as road network expansion and improvement, rapid motorization, population growth, urbanization, unsafe vehicle fleet and mixed traffic inevitably will worsen road crash deaths and injuries unless African countries invest on road safety. The situation demands to mobilize human and financial resources and enhance international cooperation for transferring experiences on crash reduction and prevention measures.
The African Development Bank is widely engaged in national and multinational road infrastructure projects in Africa. Alongside with the road infrastructure financing, the Bank has mainstreamed the road safety activities to scale-up and consolidate the Bank's efforts to support comprehensive multisectoral road safety investments in Africa. The Bank activities focus on interventions that generate and transfer knowledge, strengthen capacity, achieve quick and visible results. In line with this, the AfDB recently published the following three road safety manuals for Africa:
- New Roads and Schemes: Road Safety Audit
- Existing Roads: Proactive Approaches; and
- Existing Roads: Reactive Approaches
Following the preparation of the Manuals, a four-day training course on the use of the manuals was organized by AfDB in July 2014 in which representatives from 17 country participated. The Transport and ICT Department of the Bank is organizing a two-day High-Level Regional Road Safety Workshop to bring together top managements of road authorities and road safety lead agencies and representatives of Development Partners working in Africa. This Workshop is intended to embed and operationalize the manuals in the country systems in order to bring substantive differences to road safety on the continent. It will be held at the Bank's Headquarters, CCIA Building, in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, on 27th and 28th October 2016.
About the Workshop
The Workshop will have presentations and discuss on the following:
Safe system approach - emphasizing on the design and management of safer road infrastructure - complying with road users' characteristics and behaviour and accommodating errors. What does this mean in African context?
The benefits of using the Manuals (RSM) - what safety consideration are being made in the design and management of roads in Africa and what should be changed? How do these manuals help to bring these changes? What are the economic benefits and how do we monitor and evaluate these benefits? What are the lessons learnt in terms of the benefits (absolute injury reductions or economic benefits) of such practices elsewhere?
Embedding in country systems and operationalizing the Manuals: how do we embed these manuals and operationalize them; legal, capacity and other constraints and how do we overcome these constraints? What are the prerequisites to sustainably operationalize the manuals to maintain the safety of roads in African countries? And how can RMCs achieve these?
The workshop is expected to be attended by about 50 participants from road agencies and road safety lead agencies of African countries as well as development partners working in Africa.
