The World Health Organization and the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development have launched an African media initiative aimed at improving road-safety reporting as road crashes continue to kill nearly 250,000 people across the continent each year.
The initiative was unveiled in Abuja at a three-day forum bringing together editors, journalists, content creators and road-safety experts from several African countries.
Organizers said the meeting would contribute to the development of Africa’s first road-safety media guidelines, with a focus on evidence-based reporting and stronger public accountability.
WHO said Africa accounts for roughly one-fifth of global road-traffic deaths despite having only about three per cent of the world’s registered vehicles.
Unlike the global trend, road deaths are still increasing in the region.
Nigeria was identified as having the highest number of road-traffic fatalities in the WHO African Region, with more than 36,000 deaths annually.
WHO Representative in Nigeria Pavel Ursu said the initiative aimed to narrow the gap between road-safety science and the way crashes are reported in the media.
He said stronger journalism could help correct public misconceptions and build support for policies capable of preventing deaths and serious injuries.
WHO said news coverage often focuses narrowly on individual crashes without examining systemic factors such as unsafe road design, excessive speed, weak laws and poor enforcement.
The proposed guidelines will draw on the Safe Systems approach, which assumes that human error is inevitable and seeks to design transport systems so mistakes do not result in death or serious injury.
CJID Chief Executive Dapo Olorunyomi said editorial choices could influence whether crashes were treated simply as isolated tragedies or as broader failures of public policy and infrastructure.
Twenty participants from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda are involved in the forum.
The guidelines are expected to be completed by mid-2027. The initiative is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and builds on WHO’s wider road-safety journalism programme, which has trained thousands of reporters in countries with high traffic-death rates.
