TRANS-SAFE consortium promoting radical road safety transformation through low-cost interventions

The Alliance is part of the TRANS-SAFE consortium, an EU-funded project bringing together different partners, including city authorities and road safety agencies, NGOs, academics, student volunteers, and private sector experts from Europe and Africa. Several Africa Chapter member NGOs are also members of the consortium. The project will promote radical transformation to improve road safety in Africa, by testing and validating road safety solutions through the Living Labs — low-cost, evidence-based demonstration projects that can be scaled, and replicated across the continent. Each Living Lab relates to each of the five pillars of the Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021–2030: multimodal transport and land-use planning; safe road infrastructure; safe vehicles; safe road users; post-crash response. Community involvement and engagement of road users is a key element of the program and this is one of the areas where the Alliance and its NGOs add strong value. 

The Alliance’s role in the TRANS-SAFE consortium is to: 

• Promote the Safe System approach to those with responsibility for road safety. We are contributing to the creation of a toolkit to support peer learning networks. 
• Help to assess interventions proposed by the project’s Living Labs to help verify that they are evidence-based, low-cost (so they can be easily replicated in other African countries) and that they involve communities. 
• Communicate outcomes of the Trans-Safe project, to show how these successful interventions are enabling radical transformation, so that they can be shared with governments and replicated in other African settings.

Alliance NGOs, Healthy People Rwanda and Zambia Road Safety Trust will be among those involved in implementing Living Labs on the ground.  

To support the demonstration projects, in July, TRANS-SAFE launched its regional peer learning networks, aimed at national and subnational government agencies in Africa. These networks enable experts to share best practices and learn from one another, and also correspond to the five pillars of the Global Plan: multimodal transport and land-use planning; safe road infrastructure; safe vehicles; safe road users; post-crash response, as well as a transversal topic covering financing, legal frameworks, speed management and gender perspectives.

We look forward to sharing more about TRANS-SAFE and the outcomes of the Living Labs in coming months.