The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) has revealed an ambitious plan to reduce deaths and serious injuries on Kenyan roads by half within the next five years.

This is contained in the NTSA Road Safety Action Plan 2023-2027, which will pay more attention on particularly selected high-risk demonstration corridors and urban areas.

The plan targeting nine priority areas was unveiled in Nairobi on Wednesday in a meeting bringing together stakeholders from varied government agencies and non-state actors.

Duncan Kibogong, NTSA Deputy Director, Safety Strategies, says the action plan will pay special attention to dealing with road crashes and deaths caused by boda boda riders.

“Two of the key actions focus purely on boda boda; Motorcycle Road Safety and Boda Boda Action Plan, touching on boda boda right from training, riding, licensing, sensitization, enforcement, capacity building and all range of programmes around the same,” said Kibogong.

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He added, “Yes, it is a challenge and this action plan should be able to work with them and other stakeholders to make sure that fatalities and crashes associated with that sector reduces as well.”

On his part, Transport Principal Secretary Mohamed Daghar stressed on the importance of concerted efforts to reduce the alarming fatalities while ensuring safety on Kenyan roads.

World Bank’s Practice Manager, Transport Eastern Africa Almud Weitz praised the government for taking bold steps to drastically reduce road fatalities on Kenyan road.

“As infrastructure develops in the country, road accidents should not go up but rather go down and that really requires concerted efforts,” said Weitz.

The nine priority areas the NTSA Road Safety Action Plan 2023-2027 focuses on include funding, infrastructure safety, risk targeting as well as monitoring and evaluation systems.

Other are post-crash services, enforcement targeting unsafe behavior, road safety database, vehicle safety standards and compliance, as well as coordination of delivery partnerships.