Danish Firm to Assess Ethiopia's Road Mgmt System

NTU, a Danish consultancy company, has secured a contract to conduct a road traffic control and emergency response pilot study for 71 million Br.

The Ministry of Transport hired the company mid-June to lead a road safety and post-impact care project at five selected corridors in four regional states. The corridors are located in Amhara, Tigray, Oromia, and Southern Nations, Nationalities & Peoples' regional states and cover a total road network of 500Km.

The study includes asphalt roads that stretch from Addis Abeba to Fiche, Addis Abeba to Adama, Hossna to Butajira, Bahir Dar to Enjibara, and Meqelle to Fireweyni. Each segment covers 126Km, 84Km, 96Km, 112Km, and 81Km, respectively. All of the segments are two-lane roads except the Addis Abeba-Adama road, which has six lanes.

NTU, a company that provides consulting within the engineering, economic, planning and management fields, is expected to deliver the project in 18 months. The consultant will also provide capacity building training to traffic police, create publicity and awareness campaigns, promote safer behaviour among road users, and improve post-crash response and care services.

The purpose of the study is to enhance traffic law enforcement and thereby change the behaviour of pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, and to assess the impact of the improved post-crash care facilities on the rate of fatal accidents, according to Yonas Belete, national road safety council officer at the Ministry.

"The project aims at bringing well-coordinated and integrated road safety measures," he said. "The results will be used as benchmark performance measures to design a national road safety rollout programme."

The piloting test project is also committed to enhancing the level of cooperation between different road safety agencies, i.e. first responders, healthcare professionals and the local community.

It is about the capacity building of the road safety stakeholders and the transfer of road safety knowledge to the National Road Safety Council under the Ministry and to other participating partners. The overall objective of the study is to identify policy and institutional regulatory gaps in the sector through collecting study samples from a variety of locations in the country to actualise a national solution that can be adopted at a later stage.

The study comprises four main tasks to be accomplished in the corridors. The first task includes the enhancement of road safety regulations, identifying inadequacies in policy and regulatory tools to optimise the policy and regulatory instruments.

For the second task, the company will engage with the public and create awareness campaigns in support of traffic law enforcement. The third task involves the monitoring and evaluation of road safety enforcement enhancements; publicity and awareness campaigns; and improvements to post-impact care and safety improvements. Improving post-impact care is the fourth task of the study.