SAFER contributes to new road safety initiatives in Africa through the SaferAfrica project
After three years the SaferAfrica EC project is now successfully finalized. The aim of SaferAfrica has been to foster new initiatives addressing road safety policies, road safety management, capacity building, training and other road safety interventions at different scales.
Probably the most important and innovative result of the SaferAfrica project is the set-up of a Dialogue Platform, consisting of stakeholders from among others Africa and Europe. The Dialogue Platform links policy makers, donors and professionals engaged in road safety to plan and design road safety actions. The Dialogue Platform is intended as an advisory body to develop new road safety recommendations for Africa, also after the project formally closes in September 2019.
Methods for effective implementation
A transferability tool has also been developed to support the discussion by appraising the potential barriers to the implementation when a measure is proposed in a different context. Innovation also came in terms of new knowledge developed. New road safety data from stakeholders’ surveys on road safety management, opinions and perceptions were gathered through crowdsourcing and a survey on cultural values on road behaviours were performed. Thanks to the analyses of these data and the already available information, new evidence on risk factors and policy needs have been produced at country, trans-African corridors and regional level.
Easy accessable information
Another major result was the African Road Safety Observatory (www.africanroadsafetyobservatory.org), a participative web portal where African stakeholders can find information on road safety, such as country factsheets, capacity reviews reports, good practices and webinars.
The Observatory is the entry point to the Dialogue Platform webtool, a virtual environment for networking and discussion. Moreover, thanks to the implemented crowdsourcing functionalities, local stakeholders and citizens can report a road safety problem and solution in the African countries.
Dr. Jac Wismans, visiting professor at Chalmers, has been SAFER’s project leader and he comments upon the project:
“It was a pleasure for me contributing to this project. We as SAFER have contributed among others to the review of the African Road Safety Action plan, by analysing the latest WHO accident data and by providing information to the consortium on the status of safety measures in African countries.
SAFER also contributed to the vehicle safety content in an e-learning about road safety, developed by SaferAfrica on the five UN Pillars. The course can be accessed through the Road Safety Observatory.
“The SaferAfrica project is one of the projects of SAFER in the field of global road safety and I would encourage SAFER to continue working in this area of global road safety, particular also in view of the United Nations sustainable development goals in which road safety is one of important topics”, Dr Wismans concludes.
All SaferAfrica deliverables are available at the website: www.saferafrica.eu/publications.
