a major but neglected public health issue”

Tribune. The road kills, in Africa more than elsewhere. The bus accident that occurred on January 9 near Kaffrine in Senegal was highly publicized because of the number of victims: 40 dead and 101 injured. But it recalls a very frequent situation in the majority of African countries. This drama is thus added to a long list of recent macabre collisions.

On January 5, a bus accident left 14 dead and 70 injured in Yamoussoukro in Côte d’Ivoire; 25 dead in August 2022 north of Abidjan; 30 dead in south-eastern Kenya at the end of July 2022, 25 dead in central Egypt during the same period. In Kaffrine, the cause of the accident – ​​a tire burst – highlighted the dilapidated state of the means of transport and the lack of control of the safety elements.

In 2010, however, the decade of global action for road safety was declared under the auspices of the United Nations General Assembly. Ten years later, in February 2020, the Stockholm Declaration highlighted that no low-income country had reduced its road fatality and morbidity rates. Africa has the highest rates. The average mortality rate is estimated at 27.5 per 100,000 inhabitants on the continent while it is more than three times lower in high-income countries. Road accidents are also the leading cause of death among children and young adults aged 5 to 29.

Undervalued national balance sheets

If this decade was a failure in terms of reducing mortality and injuries, it will at least have had the merit of placing the issue at the heart of political agendas: within the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ( SDG), the ambition is to reduce the number of injuries and deaths on the world’s roads by 50% by 2030.

But first, the real question is whether African countries are able to produce reliable statistics. For example: many West African states draw their data from police intervention reports. However, the national police are not the actors most involved when a serious accident occurs.

It is mainly the firefighters who intervene to rescue victims and transport them to treatment centres. Several studies conducted in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire show that data from firefighters and hospital emergencies can be more precise. There are then four times more injuries and deaths. The national balance sheets are therefore underestimated.

The issue of injuries is also crucial. They are forced to engage in care, which is often too costly for their income. As for reception and care capacities in hospitals, they are insufficient and would need to be developed and modernized, particularly outside the capitals. Some injured people suffer from lasting handicaps, which are more difficult to treat in Africa than elsewhere. Thus, road accidents and the associated injuries also represent (and above all?) a major but neglected public health issue: few means are put in place at the pre-hospital, hospital and post-hospital levels to meet the needs .

African states are creating road safety agencies under the supervision of transport ministries to implement policies, educate users and develop certain accident-prone places. The majority of countries also have all the legislative arsenal on road regulations, but a large majority of these laws are not applied. Wearing a helmet, wearing a seat belt or even blood alcohol levels are almost never checked in the field.

Short-term actions

States rely on these agencies without them really having the means to act. They depend on other ministries which rarely accept external injunctions. There are interministerial commissions, but they rarely meet or when a major event occurs, as was the case with the Kaffrine accident. A certain number of measures were then adopted to improve road safety, but they resulted in short-term field actions.

In 2021, in Côte d’Ivoire, the government decided to enforce the wearing of helmets after several fatal accidents in the north of the country. A year later, we returned to the previous situation: barely 20% of users wear a helmet. States are trying to act, but road safety must be carried out over the long term, in several sectors simultaneously, and it is true, in difficult economic, social and politico-security contexts for these countries.

Finally, the Kaffrine accident should not hide all the other road accidents: those involving so-called vulnerable users such as pedestrians, two-wheelers – motorized or not – which represent the vast majority of injuries and deaths. in Africa. We don’t talk about them much, but they occur every day and generally among the most disadvantaged populations.

Acting on road safety requires more commitments from States and more international aid. This also involves educating from an early age on road risks, in order to change behaviour. It is under these conditions that real progress will appear.