According to the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2015 of WHO, “road traffic injuries claim more than 1.2 million lives each year and have a huge impact on health and development”.
Risk of road traffic death varies significantly by region and the disparity in road safety results is increasing. In the WHO Africa region, road traffic fatalities increased from 24.1 per 100,000 population in 2010 to 26.6 per 100,000 population in 2013. Over the same period, road fatality rates in the WHO Europe region improved from 10.3 per 100,000 population to 9.3 per 100,000 population. Road trauma in Africa is expected to worsen further, with fatalities per capita projected to double from 2015 to 2030.
Several actions are already on-going, and important policy documents are already in place, paving the way for road safety improvements. Based on the United Nation’s (UN’s) “2011-2020 a Decade of Action for Road Safety”, the African Union (AU) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) defined the African Road Safety Action Plan 2011-2020 (hereinafter “Action Plan”).
Through the adoption of the African Road Safety Charter, the Member States of the AU aimed to build a political framework to enable road safety improvement. In particular, based on the provisions of the Action Plan, specific duties and commitments for the States that ratified or accepted the Charter were defined.
In 2015, UNECA conducted a Mid-term Review of the Action Plan to assess the progress made by each country. The output of this review is constituted in the Roadmap for Accelerating the Implementation of the African Road Safety Action Plan.
These considerations suggest that Europe could play an important role in supporting African countries in improving their road safety and traffic management conditions to achieve better performance.
The general objective of SaferAfrica was to create favourable conditions and opportunities for the effective implementation of actions for road safety and traffic management in African countries by setting up a Dialogue Platform between Africa and Europe. This initiative focused on using effective tools, embedding innovative approaches and identifying pragmatic and fundable next steps to address identified road safety and traffic management problems. The Platform comprised European and African regional and national authorities (i.e. Institutions) with key road safety responsibilities, as well as other important stakeholders (e.g. International Institutions, Research Institutes and non-governmental organisations).
The Platform also provided guidance and institutional support for selecting and promoting actions to be realised in specific countries. Platform goals were:
• Contributing to developing/designing actions related to the Action Plan together with individual African countries/organisations.
• Assessing progress toward the goals of the Action Plan and, based on assessments of the solutions adopted by various countries, releasing recommendations.
• Increasing the endogenous capacities of African countries.
• Fostering the adoption of the principles of the Safe System approach.
An additional objective was to increase the awareness of African stakeholders and end-users on road safety by means of an African Road Safety Observatory. It provided in-depth information and data to the African stakeholders, as well as a set of recommendations to improve road safety situation. The Observatory also includes the Dialoague Platform interface.
