Thesis title: Assessment of Road Safety Management Systems in Selected African Countries
This thesis assessed the Road Safety Management System (RSMS) in selected African countries as a basis for developing strategic directions and providing policy recommendations for the enhancement of road safety management practices in African countries. The research was motivated by the high burden imputed by road traffic crashes (RTCs) in the African continent compared to other regions of the world. It is estimated that in Africa, RTCs claim over 300,000 lives per annum, which makes Africa the most vulnerable continent in terms of road fatalities. Despite its lower vehicle ownership, Africa’s traffic fatality rate is escalating and its fatalities per capita are projected to double between 2015 and 2030. The efforts being made towards improving road safety performance in African countries have been observed as fragmented and not evidence-based calling for a more integrated approach such as the world bank RSMS framework. Just like goods and services, road safety is produced through the production process of the RSMS. Within the framework of this research, we assessed the RSMS in selected African countries through three specific objectives.
The first objective sought to conduct a road safety management capacity review (RSMCR) for five African countries to determine their road safety management (RSM) capacity. To achieve this, we used the framework for RSM proposed in the literature to conduct a qualitative assessment in the sub-sample of five African countries. The current RSM practices in the five selected countries were overlaid on the model to facilitate insights into locations of possible shortcomings (gap analysis), through scoring existing RSM practices against recommended best practices. Our findings revealed a general weak RSM capacity of the five African countries with two aspects of RSM requiring urgent improvement: these are funding and resource allocation, and road safety promotion.
The second objective of this thesis was a comparative assessment of the road safety data collection systems in twenty-one African countries to establish the prevalence of good road safety data collection practices. The latter is useful because it is the foundation for evidence-based policy-making in road safety. Comprehensive data collection systems are also indispensable for monitoring and evaluation of road safety performance, it sets the stage for assessment of prevailing road safety risk factors and guides the target setting process. Three domains of data (accident data, exposure data, and safety performance indicator data) were assessed through interviews with road safety experts and analyzed using percentages and frequencies. The results show that there are formal systems for recording road accidents in most (76 percent) of the countries studied. However, besides the set-up of accident databases in most (76 percent) of the countries, there is a lack of travel mobility data and in-depth accident investigations (present in only 29 percent of the countries) which are crucial in evidence-based road safety policy-making. This observation means that corrective measures are not informed by the current road safety situation, and this is worsened by the report that there was no reporting process to monitor road safety interventions in the majority (62 percent) of the countries. It is therefore clear that the road safety interventions in African countries are not necessarily informed by adequate evidence, consequently not yielding expected results in a space of limited resources that stalks most African countries. We recommend the cultivation of data-based culture in road safety policy-making, and the establishment of active partnerships with research institutions for transfer of current data collection skills and practices.
Finally, the third objective of this thesis focused on the quantitative assessment of road safety performance of the selected twenty-one African countries, to obtain a holistic view of their road safety situation. The study used a Multi-Layer Data Envelope Analysis (MLDEA) to combine fourteen (14) selected road safety indicators into a composite index (CI), and compared the results to those obtained through the Geometric mean approach of combining indicator data along with the traditional ranking of fatalities per a hundred thousand population. The approach was informed by the fact that Road safety performance is a complex phenomenon, and road crashes, fatalities, and injuries are a culmination of several mishaps in an entire RSMS. Understanding the cause of the observed outcomes requires the incorporation of the factors leading to road traffic crashes and deaths. From the results, Mauritius emerged as the best country in terms of road safety performance, with a CI score of 1 while Togo and Tanzania had the poorest performance with a CI score of 0.46. This ranking was maintained in the result from the Geometric mean approach and the traditional ranking using the fatalities per a hundred thousand population, implying robustness of our results. Subsequently, we recommend Mauritius as the benchmark for road performance for the other African countries. However, this country should consider putting in place tighter age restriction for the importation of used vehicles and increasing its government expenditure on health. Further, it is also important to notice that the countries that had better RSM capacity from objective one were ahead of their counterparts when it came to rankings based on the road safety performance. There was a correlation of 0.7 between country rankings based on the RSM capacity and ranking based on the CI score for road safety performance, implying that countries with better RSM capacity were more likely to have a better road safety performance. We would therefore recommend that African countries re-look into areas of their weak RSM capacity, including putting in place good road safety data collection practices to be able to obtain improved road safety outcomes.
The novelty of this research is that it presents the first application of the MLDEA model to develop a road safety composite index for African countries with the prevailing challenges of data unavailability. This resulted in a benchmarking of their road safety performance which can set a platform for peer learning. Similarly, the RSM capacity review that was equally the first comprehensive multi-country analysis resulted in the identification of gaps within their respective RSMS. The key conclusions of the RSMCR have set the stage for application to countries with similar contexts.