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Yesterday Ghana hosted in Accra the maiden Kofi Annan Street Security for Africa Award.
Having its webinar theme as ‘Safer and Cleaner Autos in Africa: Challenges and Alternatives within the Second UN Decade of Motion for Street Security (2021-2030)’, the ceremony was organised by the Financial Fee for Africa (ECA), the Secretariat of the United-Nations Secretary-Normal’s Particular Envoy for Street Security, and Ghana’s Ministry of Transport, with the help of the Kofi Annan Basis.
The Kofi Annan Basis says the Street Security Award is called after Mr Annan to honour his legacy and proceed his essential work in that subject.
Mr Annan is claimed to have introduced the difficulty of street security and street site visitors victims to the United Nations agenda initially of the 2000s and that typically, his life work was all about prevention – stopping conflicts, starvation, ailments, squalor and all method of risks.
The organisers say on the centre of the initiative is making the efforts of bringing on board all stakeholders to make sure security on Africa’s roads.
Thus the first goal of the Award is to inspire key stakeholders being governments, the non-public sector, and civil society organisations, to develop and implement revolutionary and excellent initiatives to avoid wasting lives on Africa’s roads.
Info gathered from some sources, together with the World Well being Organisation (WHO), has it that on the subject of street accidents, Africa pays the heaviest fatality value of 26.6 street deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in comparison with the world common of 17.5 per 100,000 and 9.3 per 100,000 in Europe.
WHO states, as an illustration {that a} little one in Africa is twice as prone to die on the street than a toddler in every other a part of the world, which makes it essential to redouble efforts on the African continent to make sure sanity on the street.
A 2016 WHO report incorporates the damning assertion thatGhana is among the many international locations that report a excessive prevalence of street site visitors deaths, with 24.9 per 100,000 inhabitants and that almost 2,000 lives are misplaced within the nation every year on account of crashes – and pedestrians are significantly in danger.
That is confirmed with a Ghana Police Service report launched this 12 months that 2,921 individuals died and 13,048 injured in street crashes in 2021 and that from December 24, 2021 to January 1, this 12 months, an area of simply 9 days, 43 individuals died whereas 202 bought injured in street accidents.
Even with out going to the police, Ghanaian Instances stories from January 5 to March 15, this 12 months present a complete of 54 deaths and over 200 accidents from street crashes.
The Govt Secretary of ECA, Ms Vera Songwe, has said that street crashes value African economies as much as 5 p.c of GDP, crippling its potential development.
Taking Ghana as a selected case, Altmetric.com states that Ghana “wastes” greater than 1.2 trillion cedis (€94 million, US$128 million) yearly on road-traffic accidents, which is 1.6 p.c of the nation’s gross home product (GDP)each year.
Nobody must be faulted for questioning why a maiden street security occasion regarding the entire of Africa wouldn’t be held in Equatorial Guinea or Mauritius,as an illustration, the place street security is lauded however in Ghana, a rustic with very poor street security report and at a time the carnage on its roads retains rising.
This should not be far-fetched as a result of the person in whose honour the awards have been organised hailed from this land of gold which has didn’t make its street security golden.
In actual fact, contemplating the excessive numbers of fatalities and accidents from street crashes in Ghana, it appears inappropriate to have such an awards occasion right here, and extra so, at a time when nothing critical appears to be executed within the nation to examine the brutish behaviour on its roads.
Nevertheless, upon second thought, the Ghanaian Instances believes that the occasion can set off a change within the type of the nation placing its act collectively to show the tide to make sure security and scale back or eradicate the carnage on its roads.
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