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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Perego
(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Ana Luísa Silva (CEI-Iscte)
Rebekah Lee (University of Oxford)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Disciplinary streams:
- Environment and Geography
Short Abstract
Using road safety as both a challenge and a prism, this panel brings together diverse perspectives to explore the tensions shaping mobility and everyday life in Africa, from motorcycles and livelihoods to infrastructure, urban space, and locally situated understandings of safety.
Long Abstract
In 2021, Africa accounted for 24% of global road traffic fatalities, with an estimated 259,601 deaths (WHO, 2025). At present, the region has the world’s highest road traffic fatality rate, at 19.6 deaths per 100,000 people, although the burden is unevenly distributed: Western and Eastern Africa account for 64% of road traffic deaths despite having only around one-third of the continent’s vehicles.
Since the early 2000s, the framing of road safety as an epidemiological and global health issue has become established across research, policy, and practice, shaping how traffic fatalities and injuries are understood, measured, and addressed. Yet the problem persists, while mobility realities across Africa become more complex and diverse.
Drawing on the conference’s metaphor of prisms, this panel seeks to harness the multidisciplinary potential of African Studies. We invite both scholar and practitioner contributions exploring what different perspectives can reveal about road safety in Africa – but also to explore road safety itself as a prism to view the complexities of African lifeworlds. We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in the tensions shaping everyday mobility: motorcycles as both pathways to livelihoods and sources of injury; transport corridors alongside deteriorating rural roads; roads as contested urban spaces; and international safety frameworks overlapping with locally situated understandings of safety.
We welcome quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, historical, comparative, and interdisciplinary contributions that cross conventional boundaries between research and practice, methods, and disciplines, and open new questions about road safety, mobility, and everyday life. Papers in English, French, and Portuguese are welcome.