1. Project Introduction — Background & Problem Statement

1.1 Background

The Mano River Union (MRU) sub-region — comprising Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau — shares a network of high-risk road corridors that are critical to economic activity, cross-border trade, and regional integration. These corridors, including segments of the Trans-African Highway network, carry significant volumes of commercial vehicles, motorcycles, pedestrians, and public transport users daily. Yet they are characterized by poor road design standards, inadequate safety infrastructure, crash blackspots, and some of the highest road fatality rates in the world.

Road safety assessments using internationally recognized methodologies — including star rating systems aligned with the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) — provide a rigorous, evidence-based framework for quantifying road risk, identifying infrastructure defects, and prioritizing countermeasures that deliver the greatest reduction in fatalities and serious injuries. These tools have been applied successfully in over 100 countries, yet their systematic application across MRU countries remains limited and fragmented.

The Mano River Union Road Assessment Program (ManoRAP) is RSAI's initiative to bring a standardized, data-driven road safety assessment and star rating program to the MRU sub-region — generating the evidence base needed for safer road designs, smarter infrastructure investment decisions, and harmonized regional action on road safety.

1.2 Problem Statement

Road fatality rates across the Mano River Union sub-region rank among the highest globally, driven by a combination of infrastructure deficiencies, poor road design standards, inadequate speed management, and limited protection for vulnerable road users. Key challenges include:

• Widespread infrastructure defects — including poor pavement condition, inadequate drainage, absent sidewalks and carriageway markings, deficient road alignment, and lack of median barriers and guardrails — on high-risk corridors
• No standardized road safety assessment methodology applied consistently across MRU countries, resulting in incomparable data and fragmented investment decisions
• Crash blackspots and high-risk intersection and conflict point concentrations that are known anecdotally but not systematically identified, mapped, or prioritized
• Inadequate speed management infrastructure and enforcement — with speed limits poorly signed, unenforceable, and widely disregarded on inter-urban corridors
• Severe vulnerability of pedestrians, motorcyclists, and non-motorized road users on roads designed exclusively for motorized vehicles — with no sidewalks, safe crossings, or dedicated lanes
• Limited lighting and visibility infrastructure on high-risk corridors — exacerbating night-time crash risk particularly for pedestrians and cyclists
• Poor institutional readiness among road authorities for systematic road safety assessment, data-driven investment planning, and safe road design standard compliance
• No GIS-based mapping of road risk profiles or high-risk corridors at the regional level to inform harmonized MRU investment and policy decisions

You cannot build safer roads without knowing where they are dangerous, why they are dangerous, and what it will cost to fix them. ManoRAP generates that knowledge — systematically, credibly, and at regional scale.

The ManoRAP Star Rating System

ManoRAP applies an internationally recognized star rating methodology to assess the inherent safety of road infrastructure for all road users — independent of driver behaviour or enforcement. Roads are rated from 1 star (highest risk) to 5 stars (safest), providing a clear, comparable, and publicly communicable measure of road safety performance:

2. Project Objectives

1. Conduct standardized road safety assessments and star ratings on high-risk corridors and urban roads across the Mano River Union — generating comparable, internationally aligned road risk data for all four MRU countries.
2. Identify and map crash blackspots, infrastructure defects, and high-risk intersection and conflict points using systematic field surveys, road coding, and GIS-based spatial analysis.
3. Assess road risk for all road user categories — including pedestrians, motorcyclists, cyclists, public transport users, and motorists — with particular attention to vulnerable road user exposure on high-risk corridors.
4. Conduct speed management assessments — evaluating speed limit compliance, road design speed consistency, and the effectiveness of existing speed management infrastructure and enforcement mechanisms.
5. Assess lighting, visibility, sidewalk provision, carriageway condition, drainage, road alignment, and roadside hazard profiles across all assessed corridors.
6. Develop targeted countermeasures and infrastructure investment priorities — ranked by estimated life-saving potential and cost-effectiveness — to guide road authority investment planning and development bank financing decisions.
7. Produce GIS-based risk maps and road safety performance reports for each MRU country and at the regional level — supporting harmonized investment planning and policy advocacy.
8. Build institutional readiness and capacity among MRU road authorities for ongoing road safety assessment, safe road design standard application, and conformance review.
9. Integrate assessment findings into policy, legal, and planning frameworks — supporting road safety strategy development, infrastructure standards revision, and investment decision-making at national and regional levels.

3. Project Approach & Methodology

ManoRAP adopts a data-driven, internationally standardized road assessment methodology — combining systematic field surveys, road coding, GIS analysis, star rating, and countermeasure development tools. The approach is aligned with international road assessment program (iRAP) methodology and adapted to the MRU context.

Road Attributes Assessed Under ManoRAP

ManoRAP field surveys systematically assess the following road attributes across all surveyed corridors:

Key Interventions

4. Project Organization & Staffing

Implementing Organization: Road Safety Action International (RSAI)

5. Project Schedule

ManoRAP is implemented across five phases, covering the full cycle from corridor selection through to regional report dissemination and policy integration:

6. Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL)

7. Indicative Budget

The ManoRAP budget covers the full assessment cycle across all MRU countries. Actual costs are determined by corridor length, country access logistics, and the scope of countermeasure development required:

8. Project Log Frame — Outputs, Outcomes & Impact

9. Conclusion

Partner With Us

We welcome partnerships with institutions committed to evidence-based road safety assessment and investment across the Mano River Union:

Together, we can rate every high-risk road in the Mano River Union, invest where it matters most, and build a regional road network where no one should have to risk their life simply to travel.