Abstract

In Zambia, road traffic crashes are third highest cause of death after HIV/Aids and malaria. Survivors left suffering severe impairments, barely bounce back to productive lives. Worse enough, observed is when a wage earner dies; the entire family is at risk of enormous poverty. For example, one incident in September 2013, 11 vulnerable family members, wage earners, perished at the scene of a nasty road crash. While, earlier the same year February 2013, 53 business men and women met their fate when the bus they were on collided with an oncoming track on the Zambian Great North Road.

Preventing these tragedies in Zambia is very important, to reduce loss, severe injuries, incapacities, and posttraumatic stress which demands intense physical/psychosocial intervention and rehabilitation. Recent statistics of Zambia Police estimated conservatively that 2, 100 were killed each year in road crashes on Zambian roads and a further ten thousand remained severely injured. These road traffic crashes are a drain on national budget including the loss of human resource which negatively impacts the Zambian economy.

The government spends huge sums of money providing inadequate medical services, under constructed roads and its infrastructure. Hence, the need for a consolidated response to prevent road carnages is an urgent call for action involving all Zambian citizens. However, because road traffic crashes are a product of several conflicting factors, including human error, the probability of crashes could be reduced by funding strategies: mainly intensive road safety education, training, enforcement and engaging good engineering of both vehicles and roads.

MUKABO Road Safety, is passionately ready to support the scale up of a robust regulatory framework, accompanied by public intensive road safety education, effective safety enforcement, research, and engineering. This would prevent crashes, save lives, and achieve highest road safety sustainability goals through MUKABO’s aims and objectives in Zambia.