Road safety management and interventions in Africa: Is there a correlation between management performance and traffic fatalities?

• African countries struggle to strengthen their road safety management capacity. • Limited research and weak data management are hallmarks of road safety management in Africa. • Analysis of the relationship between road safety management and fatality rate produced mixed results. • Linear and beta regressions suggest that the relationship is not statistically significant. • However, a robust regression method shows a significant correlation. The primary aim of this article is to deepen understanding of road safety management in Africa and its relationship with traffic fatalities on the continent. Drawing from a performance review of the African Road Safety Action Plan 2011–2020, the article examines the extent to which interventions to strengthen road safety management capacity on the continent are implemented. The analysis shows that many countries struggle to mobilise finance, facilitate research, strengthen data management systems, monitor, evaluate and report on road safety. As a result, road safety management capacity on the continent remains weak, hampering the implementation of interventions in other road safety pillars, namely safer roads and mobility, safer vehicles, safer road users and post-crash response. We also use different regression models to analyse the relationship between performance in road safety management and traffic fatality rates. Mixed results are obtained. Analysis using linear and beta regression models suggests that road safety management is not a statistically significant predictor of fatality rate. However, a significant correlation between road safety management performance and variation in road fatality rate is obtained when the robust regression method, which handles outliers in data, is used. These results are useful as they suggest that strengthening road safety management may not be sufficient to significantly reduce road deaths in Africa. It is therefore imperative to investigate the relative importance of other factors that contribute to traffic fatalities on the continent.