As a member of the SaferAfrica consortium, IRF took the lead and presented the first two of a series of webinars intended for anyone involved in African Road safety management, research and education. The third webinar will be staged on 20 December and will present results of the research carried out on road safety data practices in Africa.

In October 2018, the Horizon 2020 EU-funded SaferAfrica project, of which IRF is a consortium member, started a successful series of webinar sessions. The first couple of sessions recorded participants from 4 continents and 17 countries, comprising 10 African countries such as Cameroon, Ethiopia and Nigeria, and included stakeholders from institutions, road safety professionals, academics, NGOs and policy makers.

The first webinar, held on 29th October 2018 by IRF Director General Susanna Zammataro, was an introductory session providing background on the SaferAfrica project and highlighted key focus areas. It offered a brief overview on the African Road Safety Observatory and the Digital Dialogue Platform including the crowdsourcing functionality, which allows everyone to participate in making African roads safer.

Mid-November, the second webinar was hosted by Dr. Cristian Gonzalez, IRF Director of Data & Statistics. This session on Data Collection and Management discussed existing methods of road safety data collection (best practices, methods and tools), drew awareness to the discrepancies often found between official national data and WHO estimates, and provided suggestions on how to bridge these. In particular for developing countries, the need to centralise data from local sources such as the police, health services (ambulances, hospitals etc.) and government institutions was highlighted in order to obtain a more accurate picture and to be able to draw meaningful conclusions with regard to road safety.

The third webinar will be held on 20th December 2018 by Prof. George Yannis, Professor in Traffic Safety and Management at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). This session will address road safety data practices in Africa as documented in the context of SaferAfrica project. Initially the findings from a review on road safety data collection systems and definitions will be presented. At a second stage, recommendations and guidelines for a minimum set of harmonised data collection procedures and standard definitions will be provided applied in the short– to medium term aiming to improve African data collection systems. Finally, the road safety data collected in previous phases will be analysed and certain risk factors based on specific topics will be identified and reported.

To sign up for the SaferAfrica webinars, or to watch the recordings of webinars one and two, please visit the following website:
http://www.africanroadsafetyobservatory.org/road-safety-knowledge/capacity-building/saferafrica-webinars/

For more information, please contact the IRF Secretariat: info[@]irfnet.ch