The Safe System
Approach in Action
The SARSAI programme in
sub-Saharan Africa
Case study

This case study is part of a package of materials accompanying the final report of a joint International
Transport Forum–World Bank Working Group, entitled The Safe System Approach in Action.
The case study was authored by Rita Cuypers (FIA Foundation), Mr Jeffrey Witte (Amend), Ayikai Poswaya(Amend) and Juliet Adu (Amend).
The ITF Secretariat would like to thank Soames Job for his edits to the case study. David Prater (ITF)
prepared the case study for publication. Veronique Feypell, Asuka Ito and Stephen Perkins (ITF) coordinated the Working Group’s activities.
Any findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do notnecessarily reflect the views of the International Transport Forum, the World Bank or the OECD. Neither
the OECD, the ITF, the World Bank nor the authors guarantee the accuracy of any data or other information
contained in this publication and accept no responsibility whatsoever for any consequence of their use.
This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any
territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory,
city or area.
Cite this work as: ITF (2022), “The SARSAI programme in sub-Saharan Africa”, Case Study, ITF, Paris.

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Introduction
This case study was prepared by a joint International Transport Forum–World Bank Working Group
convened in 2020–2021. The case study forms part of a package of materials accompanying the Working
Group’s final report, The Safe System Approach in Action (ITF, 2022a).
The Safe System approach to road safety takes as its starting point the ethical position that there is noacceptable level of road deaths and serious injuries. The report proposes a framework for designing,
implementing and assessing projects with a Safe System focus. It draws on lessons from real-world casestudies to offer guidance on implementing Safe System interventions.
The Working Group analysed 17 case studies in total, paying special attention to their Safe System content.
While not every case study was a perfect example of the Safe System approach, all contained valuablelessons. In addition, several common themes emerged. A separate ITF Working Paper (2022b) sets out thethematic analysis.
This case study contains four parts. First, it provides context for the specific intervention and the roadsafety problems it aimed to solve. Second, it outlines the interventions implemented to solve these
problems and the results. The analysis is structured according to the five key components of the Safe
System framework outlined in the main report (ITF, 2022a), namely:
1. Establish robust institutional governance. Permanent institutions are required to organise
government intervention covering research, funding, legislation, regulation and licencing and tomaintain a focus on delivering improved road safety as a matter of national priority.
2. Share responsibility. Those who design, build, manage and use roads and vehicles and provide
post-crash care have a shared responsibility to prevent crashes resulting in serious injury or death.
3. Strengthen all pillars. When all road-safety pillars are stronger, their effects are multiplied; if one
part of the system fails, road users are still protected.
4. Prevent exposure to large forces. The human body has a limited physical ability to tolerate crashforces before harm occurs; the system should prevent those limits from being exceeded.
5. Support safe road-user behaviour. While road-user errors can lead to serious harm, the Safe
System focuses on roads and vehicles designed for safe interaction with road users. It supports
humans not to make mistakes and tune their tasks as much as possible to their competencies.
Third, the case study identifies lessons from the project, again structured according to the five key
components of the Safe System framework. Fourth, it offers conclusions.
Access the full set of case studies on the ITF website: https://www.itf-oecd.org/safe-system-in-action.

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Context
The School Area Road Safety Assessments Improvements (SARSAI) programme aims to save lives at schools
in sub-Saharan Africa where children are at high risk of road-traffic injuries, while working with governments
to adopt changes to policy and practice that will result in safe roads for all road users delivered over the longterm and at scale. As of January 2022, SARSAI has been implemented in over 50 high-risk school areas(approximately 80 schools) in nine countries across the region.
Road-safety themes: Pedestrian and child safety
Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest road-traffic injury rates in the world and accounts for 16% of roaddeaths despite only having 2% of the world’s vehicles. Most children walk to school and child pedestrians
are one of the highest risk groups for road traffic injuries, a leading cause of child death and injury.
Most African cities lack basic infrastructure for pedestrians in general and child pedestrians specifically.
Many lack continuous footpaths, safe crossings, street lighting, and effective speed control in highpedestrian areas. There is also inadequate maintenance of pedestrian facilities, such as footpaths, when
they do exist. Many footpaths are taken over by commerce or parking, forcing pedestrians to walk on theroad. This lack of basic amenities is symptomatic of a wider dysfunction in urban and mobility planning.
Many sub-Saharan African countries also do not have a strong lead road-safety agency. Instead,responsibility for road safety is divided between government bodies. Communication and collaboration
between ministries, departments, and agencies is poor, and funding for road safety is inadequate. For
example, traffic police may record the numbers of deaths at the scene of a crash but will not follow up
with hospitals to find out if other victims died in the hours and days that followed. There is also a lack of
capacity within civil society and the media to hold governments to account.
The overall goal of SARSAI is to provide safe journeys to school for children. Some key aspects of the
programme include separating children from traffic, providing safe crossing points, reducing vehicle
speeds to 30 km/h or less where children walk to school, conducting road-safety education, and advocating
for safe infrastructure provision in general. The SARSAI programme involves the following steps:•

A standardised assessment of high-risk school areas that looks at the existing behaviour ofchildren, drivers and other road users;•

Analysis of existing road infrastructure and design of site-specific infrastructure to improvesafety;•Installation of new infrastructure, including speed humps, zebra crossings, bollards, sidewalks,signage, fencing and new school gates;•

Community and school road-safety education;•

Infrastructure “ribbon-cutting” events to use as platforms to advocate for safe school zone
infrastructure and safe speeds to the media and government officials; and•Monitoring, evaluation, and advocacy follow-through.

All these steps are carried out while working with the relevant government and community stakeholders.

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Funding
The cost of a SARSAI infrastructure implementation ranges from USD 20 000֪–40 000, depending on thespecific needs of the school. Over the past 10 years, SARSAI has benefited from funding from the FIA
Foundation, the Puma Energy Foundation and FedEx. The SARSAI principles are now embedded in a
number of World Bank road-infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa with continued support from the
FIA Foundation.

Actors and leadership
SARSAI is led by Amend, with support of the FIA Foundation, and involves a wide range of stakeholders,
including local governments, schools, and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Interventions and results
Establish robust institutional governance
SARSAI aims to change the philosophy of engineers, road agencies and politicians from designing roads forvehicles to designing roads for people. The SARSAI process involves indirect capacity building of local
engineers and project managers where the programme is implemented.
A national 30km/h speed limit around school areas only exists in a few of the nine sub-Saharan countries
in which SARSAI has been implemented, and even then such laws are rarely enforced or signposted. In
Zambia, a national 30 km/h safe school zone law was passed in 2020, as a result of several SARSAI
implementations and accompanying ribbon-cutting events, which caught the attention of the mayor of
the capital city, Lusaka, and the Minister of Transport. In Namibia, there is no national law for 30km/h
limits around schools; however, as a result of SARSAI projects, local policy in the capital, Windhoek, waschanged in 2019 to introduce speed limits of 30 km/h around all schools in the city.

Share responsibility
For each SARSAI project, Amend maps out key road-safety stakeholders, including Amend staff, local NGO
partners, school communities and relevant government agencies. Amend also establishes professional
relationships with road-safety consultants, engineers, and contractors to understand road infrastructure
design standards, as well as materials quality and testing procedures.
Each of the key stakeholders is involved throughout the programme and has well-defined roles andresponsibilities. Community members, including shop owners and neighbours outside schools, areengaged from the start and consulted for detailed input at the different stages of the programme. On
some projects, they contribute to creating safe infrastructure as well by helping clear litter and overgrowthfrom pedestrian footpaths.

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It is also essential to secure the co-operation of local government authorities. They can also effectively
appeal to, and communicate with, higher levels of government that are sometimes harder to reach. The
local authorities are the ones that can ban parked vehicles and relocate petty business to allow safe
pedestrian movement. It is also important to select high-risk schools with head teachers who show agenuine interest and willingness to co-operate.
Launch events in each country are an important component and they form focal points for subsequent
government advocacy for safe school areas. Government representation is a key purpose of the events:
when government officials see for themselves that safe infrastructure around schools is popular,
affordable and possible, it can help set the stage for future changes to government policy and practices.
In Mozambique, Amend established a Private-Sector Road Safety Forum and used this as a platform forraising the profile of the importance of 30 km/h speed limits around schools.
In Ghana, Amend, with Bloomberg Philanthropies, contributed to the development of a Pedestrian Road
Safety Action Plan for Accra in 2017. Subsequent to this, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly agreed to install
30 km/h signage around schools and hospitals in the city. Amend also assisted in installing speed limit signs
at two clusters of schools (10 schools in total) in partnership with the Ghanaian Department of Urban
Roads, which was undertaking other safety infrastructure works around these schools in 2019.

Strengthen all parts
Collecting data is a crucial element of the SARSAI assessment process and crash data are often difficult toobtain. In partnership with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Amend
conducted a multi-year population-based control study impact evaluation of SARSAI in Tanzania from 2015
to 2016. A total of 18 schools were identified (9 intervention and 9 control schools) using the SARSAI
method. Surveys were carried out in households with 12 957 school-aged children at baseline and 13 555
children at follow-up. Collected data included basic demographic information on all school-aged
household members and whether they had sustained a road-traffic injury in the previous 12 months. Afterthe implementation of the infrastructure enhancements and a site-specific educational programme
one year later, data were collected in the same manner. The evaluation found that the SARSAI programme
results in a statistically significant reduction of over 26% in the number of children injured in road traffic.
Amend has also tested various road-construction materials for the SARSAI programme to attempt to
document durable, affordable and safe road-construction materials suitable for the African context.
Further, Amend has published a toolkit of the practical infrastructural solutions used in SARSAI which istargeted at government and contracting engineers.

Prevent exposure to large forces
Up to 90% of the streets and roads in sub-Saharan African countries are shared by fast-moving vehicles
and pedestrians with no provision of basic footpaths. Using speed policy to minimise the potential kinetic
energy released in a road-traffic collision is essential to providing a forgiving road environment. SARSAI
uses cost-effective infrastructure solutions to protect pedestrians and vulnerable road users on all formsof road network including in local neighbourhoods and on routes to school.
In Tanzania, for example, at nine intervention schools, a SARSAI programme was fully implemented at a
cost of approximately USD 18 000 per school. Infrastructural changes included: 6 asphalt speed humps to6

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reduce vehicle speeds, 12 asphalt rumble strips, 44 road signs to inform drivers that they are entering Safe
School Zones, 10 zebra crossings, 11 chequerboard markings on speed humps, 37 bollards to prevent
encroachment by vehicles onto pedestrian areas, 10 natural-earth speed humps and 11 crossing slabs overopen drains. For every 286 children whose schools are part of the SARSAI programme, one road traffic
injury is prevented per year.
Another example is seen in Zambia where Amend, together with its local NGO partner and local engineer,
worked in collaboration with the office of the mayor of Lusaka to implement road-infrastructure
improvements around Justin Kabwe Primary School. The road in front of the school was quite busy withvehicular traffic. Following the technical assessments of the school area and interviews with children,
teachers and the wider community near the school, proposals were designed and put forward to improve
the road-safety situation. These improvements comprised footpaths around the school to facilitatepedestrian movement, a raised zebra crossing to facilitate pedestrians’ ability to cross the road safely,
rumble strips to alert drivers to the presence of the crossing point ahead, a dedicated pedestrian gate,
signage and bollards. Before implementation of the road safety improvements, the 85th percentile speedof vehicles was above 30km/h but this dropped by 56% to 14km/h after implementation, demonstrating amuch safer environment for pedestrians.

Support safe road-user behaviour
The baseline assessment of high-risk school areas consists of analysing the surrounding roadinfrastructure, but also the existing behaviour of children, drivers and other road users. These road-safetyassessments have identified that many children are not aware of recommended safe practices while
walking to school. Children have been observed playing on the road, crossing at dangerous locations, andwalking with their backs to the traffic.
Physical infrastructure designed to improve the safety of pupils is constructed to create a more forgiving
environment and this is accompanied by tailored road-safety education provided at the schools. Primaryschool lessons teach the basics of what it means to be safe when using the road. Via entertaining
instruction and songs, classroom teaching and practical lessons, messages include: how to be seen by
drivers, how to choose a safe place to cross the road (with specific examples from the immediate schoolzone), how to cross the road safely, how to walk safely along the road, and how to find a safe place to play.
SARSAI road-safety assessments have identified speeding as a main issue around schools. The risk factorof speeding vehicles is targeted through speed humps, rumble strips and road signs. Post-implementation
speed measurements outside SARSAI schools show that the programme consistently results in vehicle
speed reductions, usually to less than 30km/h – the globally accepted recommended limit for areas withhigh pedestrian activity.

Lessons
The most important aspect of a SARSAI implementation – from the point of view of delivering lasting, broadsystemic change – is ongoing governmental advocacy. Clearly, a non-profit organisation cannot – and
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should not – be responsible for the design and provision of safe infrastructure in a country. That is the role,of course, of governments. But creating lasting change to well-established systems is generally not a simple
or quick process. While no financing institution or government wants the roads they finance and build tocause injuries and deaths, changing the practices that lead to such roads can be challenging.
Footpaths and cycle paths lack the political reputation-building potential of new highways or bridges. But
the perception of footpaths as a side-line activity needs to be changed, so that they are recognised andcelebrated as a cornerstone of an urban liveability/public health strategic approach. For the international
donor community, their national or city counterparts, and the charity-giving public, footpaths should be
as compelling a solution as mosquito nets for malaria.
As evidenced by SARSAI, the ways to prevent road-traffic injury are well-established and readily available.
But if changing policies and practices were easy – as easy as simply demonstrating to financing institutions
and governments how roads can be designed and built safely – the change would have already happened.
Therefore, taking the lifesaving principles demonstrated in SARSAI to scale is going to be the ongoing workof many years and will necessarily involve the goodwill, commitment and effort of a huge number ofconcerned stakeholders from hundreds of governments and other institutions operating across Africa.
Advocacy challenges are multi-faceted and profound and go to the heart of the question of why vulnerable
road users are dying on sub-Saharan Africa’s roads. Approaches need to be both based on the promotionof evidence-based solutions as well as a display of high-level cultural and political sensitivity.

Conclusions
Long-term advocacy and capacity building through demonstration projects such the SARSAI programme
are a vital step in broader road-safety improvements. In this respect several aspects of this programme
highlight good practice for scaling up road-safety works, including sound evaluations to demonstrate
success, visible infrastructure changes, ribbon-cutting (opening) ceremonies to give political visibility, andsuccessfully embedding lessons into World Bank projects. Further expansion to broader local and national
government policy, and expansion into policy for other multilateral development banks, will further
enhance these successes.
Strong features of this programme include stakeholder mapping and collaboration, and the success of aneffective NGO (Amend) in bringing the projects to completion. This is an important model of successful
implementation of low-cost engineering programmes which is also working through an NGO, the Eastern
Alliance for Safe and Sustainable Transport (EASST), in Central Asia.
Finally, in a Safe System, it is vital that safety interventions do not rely on just improving the behaviours ofroad users (especially children) but rather address the many elements of the system – as this project does
– by adding footpaths and safe crossing infrastructure, and by forcing speeds down.

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References
ITF (2022a), The Safe System Approach in Action, Research Report, OECD Publishing, Paris,
https://www.itf-oecd.org/safe-system-in-action.
ITF (2022b), “Safe System Implementation in Practice”, ITF Working Paper, available on request.

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The Safe System Approach in Action
The SARSAI programme in sub-Saharan Africa
This case study tells the story of the School Area Road Safety
Assessments Improvements (SARSAI) programme, which aims to save
lives on school journeys in sub-Saharan Africa, where children are athigh risk of road-traffic injuries.
The case study is part of a package of materials accompanying the final
report of a joint International Transport Forum–World Bank Working
Group, entitled The Safe System Approach in Action.
The Safe System approach to road safety takes as its starting point the
ethical position that there is no acceptable level of road deaths andserious injuries. The report proposes a framework for designing,
implementing and assessing projects with a Safe System focus.
The report also draws on lessons from real-world case studies to offer
guidance on implementing Safe System interventions. While not every
case study was a perfect example of the Safe System approach, allcontain valuable lessons for policy makers and road-safety actors.