Analyzing the Africa Road Safety Action Plan through the SaferAfrica Crowdsourcing tool

In 2011 the Africa Road Safety Action Plan (ARSAP) established a roadmap to reduce road traffic crashes by 50% by 2020. Despite this effort, Africa is the continent with the worst road safety performance. To reverse this trend, the SaferAfrica project, a joint effort of 17 partners from Africa and Europe, was launched in 2016. Within the framework of this project, the Crowdsourcing tool was developed and implemented through the African Road Safety Observatory. This tool aims to collect opinions and road safety needs from African citizens, report general road safety issues at the local level, and propose ideas to improve road safety in the country of origin. Seventy-three reports were received from 29 countries covering the five geographical African regions. However, Crowdsourcing participants frequently reported more road safety problems in a single report, so a total of 180 feedback were received. Thus, the objective of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis between the road safety reports from the Crowdsourcing tool and the ARSAP expected accomplishment and activities. Two main road safety issues, not included in the ARSAP, were highlighted by several respondents, which are unsafe school travel and informal transport. Informal transport refers to typically unregulated (or poorly regulated) and unconventional transport modes operating with flexible fares, schedules and routes. Further aspects highlighted, not addressed by the ARSAP, were a general lack of roads maintenance, the increasing use of personal mobility devices (pedelecs, e-bikes, segway, electric kick scooters), obstruction and defacing of road signs, and the safety conditions at road work zones. These issues might represent emerging aspects worth considering in a future update of the plan for the decade of action for road safety 2021-2030.