AfroNews April 2023

Motor vehicle accidents kill more people in Africa than elsewhere - a priority public health problem but all too ignored. 

It was the end of the nineties when we walked the Tanzanian soil with my family. Wife and children had a frightening accident, fortunately without serious consequences and without hospitalizations. The car where my parents were traveling saw a truck appear in its lane, after a nasty hairpin bend, and my wife driving was forced to widen the curve by tumbling down the escarpment (it was a mountainous area, near Mikumi). A few months earlier, another aid worker, blinded by the setting sun, was unable to distinguish in time an abandoned trailer in the lane, without warning signs: the wife and partner of another aid worker died. Stories like this are sadly numbered galore. For a cooperator, the main cause of hospitalization, I learned then, was precisely the traumas of the road. Not to mention when, in Kenya, a bus had an accident: the hospital was immediately alerted and receptive to many people at the same time. 

An article in Le Monde, in January 2023, reported that in 2010 the Decade of Global Action on 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 road death 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.

Here the complete article: https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2023/01/12/les-accidents-de-la-route-en-afrique-une-question-de-sante-publique-majeure-mais-negligee_6157636_3212. html