Challenges in the Management of Road Safety in Tanzania: The Need for an Integration Framework

Abstract

Tanzania is hardest hit by daily accident deaths and casualties on the roads. Although various measures have been taken by the government, enforcement agencies and NGOs, accidents and fatalities keep growing at a rate above that of killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. The main causes observed were that road safety has multiple key autonomous stakeholders having different fragmented information systems which are not inter-operable because of being proprietary in nature, thus inhibiting the timely and coordinated sharing of information among them. This paper presents the lessons learned from different stakeholders following a series of workshops and meetings with these key stakeholders to understand the problem from their institutional contexts. Hence, an
integration framework is developed and implemented to facilitate enforcement of road traffic regulations and to enable the different stakeholders cooperate and share information efficiently and with transparency in sustained road safety regulations enforcement. It is envisaged that if the integrated platform is successfully adopted, it can reduce the heavy duplication of efforts and investment in incoherent data systems by individual stakeholders in terms of hardware, consumables and personnel resources. The integrated platform for the road safety management system is in place, however, it needs a policy direction from the government to galvanise the major stakeholders.