WHO and CJID aim to reframe road safety reporting in Africa
The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) is collaborating with the World Health Organization to improve how African newsrooms report on road safety.
The partnership will be anchored by the African Road Safety Reporting Forum, a three-day convening to be held in Abuja in September 2026, which will bring together 20 editors, journalists, and media influencers from Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa.
Africa is the only world region where road traffic injuries are still rising, with an increase of 17 per cent between 2010 and 2021. The continent now accounts for nearly one in five road deaths worldwide, despite being home to only 15 per cent of the global population, and it carries the highest road traffic fatality rate of any region, despite having the lowest per capita motorisation.
Yet much of the media coverage of road traffic crashes does not reflect the scale or causes. Stories too often still frame crashes as random accidents rather than as preventable system disfunction. It is still common to place responsibility on individual road users rather than on unsafe infrastructure and vehicles. Media reporting is mirrored in political thinking, and vice versa.
To challenge this, Forum participants will work with WHO technical experts and leading African editors to develop industry-standard editorial and reporting guidelines on road safety for the continent. They will also produce a series of road safety stories that put the new guidelines into practice and will continue to refine the guidelines through an online working group after the forum. Successful applicants will receive practical training on solutions-focused and accountability-driven reporting, alongside full travel, accommodation, and daily stipend support.
Akintunde Babatunde, Executive Director of CJID, described road safety as one of Africa’s most urgent yet underreported public health challenges. “The way societies understand road crashes shapes the policies they demand and the solutions they support. Through this partnership with the World Health Organization, CJID is bringing together journalists, editors, and media influencers from across Africa to strengthen evidence-based reporting, advance accountability, and help build a media ecosystem that contributes to safer roads and saves lives.”
Ifeanyi Chukwudi, who leads the implementation of the African Road Safety Reporting initiative at CJID, said that journalists shape how the public and policymakers understand the road safety crisis. Through this initiative, he explained, “CJID and the WHO want to give African journalists the evidence, the tools, and the shared standards to report road safety as the systemic and solvable problem it is.”
Applications for the forum are open to editors, journalists, and media influencers with a demonstrated interest in public health or road safety reporting. Priority will be given to applicants based in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Africa, though strong applicants from other African countries may also be considered.
Applications close soon, on 10 July 2026, and all interested applicants can apply here.
Photos by Ssenyondo Gabriel & Patrick Marah on Unsplash