Curbing Africa’s Road Deaths at the Road Safety Africa Summit MyZA

The African continent experiences 200 000 road deaths a year. The basic premise for South Africa’s national transport policy framework is “to provide safe, reliable, effective, efficient and fully integrated transport operations and infrastructure which will best meet the needs of freight and passenger customers at improving levels of service and cost.” These fundamentals are echoed in Transport Departments across Africa. Why then are road death tolls continuing to rise across Africa and what are governments doing to curb the tolls?

In Kenya, Home Affairs Minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha recently announced the strategic use of information and communication technology to curb road accidents. South Africa has followed the move towards automated traffic management applications such as tolling system, average speed trapping and the demerit system which has yet to be implemented. In Uganda the strategy is to use a mix of engineering, enforcement and education in their drive towards road safety.

Botswana‘s roads are also battling to handle the capacity of road usage and the country has prepared terms of reference for several projects: lane widening, bus priority program, concept design of two interchanges, centralised traffic control system (CTC), and traffic lights refurbishment.

The whole of Africa is gearing up and shows commitment to improving the safety of roads. However, the idea is not to repave a dangerous intersection or to just replace old speed limit signage but rather to look at holistic solutions that involve all aspects of road management such as engineering, design, maintenance, traffic and speed monitoring with technology integration. Africa’s 7th Annual Road Safety Africa Summit will look at all these areas of road management and how they can be implemented strategically to curb road deaths.

The Road Safety Africa Summit takes place from 26 to 29 September 2011 in Johannesburg, South Africa