1 THE CURRENT SITUATION
1.1 Estimating Road Deaths in Africa
Previous global or regional reviews of road deaths undertaken by TRL, the World Bank and others have acknowledged the problems associated with data reliability and under reporting. That said, traditional reliance has always been on the use of officially published statistics based on police reports. This study describes the results from these official statistics and then makes a "best" estimate of the real totals using the described correction techniques.

The officially reported number of persons killed in road crashes in the different countries (for the latest year available) are shown in Table 3.1. Data are available in most countries for years 1996 to 1998 but in a few such as Angola, Niger, Sudan and Liberia, the latest year was as far back as 1985. In some countries the reported deaths are very low, for example 22 in Chad, 43 in Gabon, 58 in Central African Republic. There may indeed be relatively few road deaths in these countries but it is much more likely that they are significantly under-reported.

Two countries alone account for almost fifty per cent of all reported deaths, namely South Africa and Nigeria. The South African value of over 9,000 appears to be consistent over time. For example, it was at about the same value in the mid 1980's. Nigeria on the other hand at 6,185 deaths is now showing a dramatic reduction from a high of over 9,200 just a few years ago. This recent figure must be treated with caution in that it is unlikely that a large amount of investment in road safety activities has taken place in recent years resulting in this dramatic reduction. Other countries also showing significant numbers of deaths include Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. The 42 country total of 35,394 deaths and the individual national totals are significant underestimates of the true totals.

To improve the estimate of the current fatality situation in Africa, four additional correction steps need to be undertaken. These are:

Updating the fatality figure from the latest year available (which ranged from 1985 to 1998) to the year 2000.


Estimating for those countries where fatality data was not available at all.


Adjusting for the under-recording of fatalities by the police when the official database does not include all fatalities notified to the police.


Adjusting for the non-reporting of fatalities by the public, i.e. where the police are not notified of the incident.
This correction process was developed as part of a global review undertaken by TRL for the GRSP (Jacobs et al, 2000) and the results for each stage are described in turn below.


http://www.grsproadsafety.org/themes/default/pdfs/Estimating%20Global%20Road%20Fatalities%20-%20full%20report.pdf

http://www.who.int/roadsafety/week/activities/national/nga/en/index.html

http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/about/international/africa/appa.htm

http://www.roadsafetynigeria.com/news.html

http://www.factbook.net/EGRF_Regional_analyses_Africa.htm

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