2025 – Smart and Safe Kenya Transport (smarTTrans) (USA)
ieConnect for Impact—the transport program of the World Bank’s Development Impact Group, funded with UK International Development from the UK government—is honored to announce that its Smart and Safe Kenya Transport (smarTTrans) project has received the Prince Michael International Road Safety Award. Prince Michael International Road Safety Awards are presented to organizations in recognition of their outstanding contribution to improving road safety globally. The award recognizes smarTTrans’ contribution to global road safety through a long-term approach to reforming data collection and use in Kenya, with the potential to scale to other jurisdictions.
In Kenya, the WHO estimates that road traffic crash (RTC) fatalities are 4.5 times the figure in the official registry. Poor data and limited analytics constrain the government’s ability to develop policies and interventions to effectively regulate, monitor and enforce road safety.
ieConnect’s smarTTrans project partnered with multiple Kenyan ministries and agencies to enhance the country’s road safety policies by making intensive use of data analytics and rigorous impact evaluation. smarTTrans aimed to prioritize investments and optimize prevention to advance faster and more cost effectively to meet SDG 3.6 on reducing deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes in Kenya. The knowledge and tools generated by the program also aim to influence more effective road safety policymaking across countries that similarly lack data and evidence to inform policy.
The project has achieved its goals across all three objectives:
- Build Data and Analytics: smarTTrans pioneered the use of machine learning algorithms applied to social media and digitized police records to create the first georeferenced crash dataset and map for Nairobi. This identified high-risk road corridors, finding that 16% of locations accounted for 50% of crashes in Nairobi in 2017-2018, allowing the government to focus efforts on less than 1% of the road network, maximizing the impact of limited resources.
- Capacity Building: The program integrated an innovative “learning-by-doing” approach, conducting ongoing hands-on training sessions with three key institutions since 2016. This built analytics teams within the institutions, ensuring the use of data systems for long-term road safety policy improvements.
- Rigorous Evaluation: smarTTrans generated valuable knowledge through four impact evaluations using randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs to inform more effective interventions. Findings included, for instance, that public safety signals can lead to a 25% drop in speeding alerts in public transit providers.
The Director General of the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) in Kenya noted the profound impact of the work, stating that “… if you look at the National Road Safety Action Plan, their segment [Smarttrans], though the most silent, became the most powerful component in regard to showing the collectiveness of all the support required.” In a training on crash maps, officials stated, “This will be a game changer for Kenya, it will inform decision making and definitely lead to reduction of loss of life… The geocoding of crashes will help in coming up with data-backed driven strategies moving forward.”
The smarTTrans project’s success is a replicable model: all data tools and instruments, such as the Location Extractor Unique (ULEx) for crowdsourced crash data, are publicly available and can be adapted to help other low- and middle-income countries advance faster and more cost-effectively towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.6 on reducing road traffic deaths and injuries
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