Improving safety of pedestrians and bicyclists in Nairobi: Japheths Ogendi, part one
Nairobi Friday 23 October 2009
I am really surprised at what a transportation geek I morphed into. I have been in Nairobi four days now and with what little I have seen it is stunning. I still have not got my head around the fact that I am actually here.
The smells, the sounds, the light are a treat. The air smells of musty red clay combined with the scent of the flowers with a little tinge of wood smoke. I am sitting out on a patio listening to all the birds as the sun sets and there are few white clouds against the blue sky and I can see the changing colour of clouds as the sun is setting.
The whole car thing here has really bothered me since we arrived. I was trying to be respectful, not being too judgmental about it and trying to understand it, but all the accumulation experiences of cab rides are starting to inform a perception of Nairobi.
There is this complex mixture of “risk perception” as a visitor here. Security is an issue here. While Kenya has had a very successful civil society until the post-election violence in 2007, there is now a sense that the country is at a crossroads. There are a number of serious allegations of human rights violation that have been investigated by a special envoy of the UN commission of human rights and they have been substantiated in a report that has been widely discussed in Kenya. The is a general problem of governance related to lack of accountability and transparency that Kenya is struggling with at this moment.
From an outsider’s perspective, the predicament of pedestrians at the side of the road is indicative of a larger issue of the lack of empowerment among the lower strata of Nairobian society. As a visitor, I am cocooned in an envelope of privilege. The advice we are getting is that we should travel everywhere by car. I am so used to experiencing a city by walking; the perception of the pedestrian is considerably different than that from a car.
I am here in Nairobi attending the International Conference Urban Health (ICUH) and have been hearing some pretty heavy papers about urban health issues on the African Continent, but more in general about the whole phenomena of urbanization that is occurring all over the world. I hope over the course of the next couple weeks to unpack some my notes on the presentation that I have heard and write about them here. On Friday, the last day of the meeting, Anita and I attended an oral session entitled Injury/violence. The paper that we wanted to hear was entitled: “Improving safety of pedestrian and bicyclist in Nairobi city: lesson from Netherlands and Germany” by Japheths Ogend who is at the School of Public Health and Community at Maseno University. This paper was so exciting and it validated all of my feelings and thoughts that I‘ve had since arriving and better still from an African perspective.
The paper reviewed some evidence about the health benefits of active lifestyles and reviewed current risk factors to health due to the rates of injury and fatalities of pedestrians and cycles. The picture that Mr. Ogendi develops is pretty staggering ( abstract here). Nairobi, as many other African cities, is rapidly growing with increased population. This new population growth is putting increased pressure on the transportation infrastructure, which is leading to increased conflict between cars and pedestrian and cyclist resulting in increase rates of injury and fatality. Between the year 2000 and 2008 Nairobi had 4943 road traffic deaths and 75% of these deaths were of pedestrians and bicyclists. Case Fatality Rate for pedestrians, increased by 83% from 12.5% in 2000 to 22.9% in 2008. Clearly something is going on here.
I am processing Mr. Ogendi’s recommendations on how to improve the safety of pedestrian and cyclist and will post this when it is done. I also did an interview of him and captured it on video and will also post this when I am finished editing.