NIT, US-FHWA partner in research collaboration, tech transfer

NATIONAL Institute of Transport (NIT) is in talks with the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to set up major research collaborations and technology transfer.

The FHAWA’s cooperation with NIT would help the Institutes’ Regional Centre for Excellence in Road safety (RCoE) to become an agent of change in road safety at a regional level.

“The FHWA’s responsibility is to ensure that America’s roads and highways continue to be among the safest and most technologically sound in the world, therefore the cooperation with NIT would help the lecturers at the RCoE to be imparted with knowledge from FHAWA,” said the NIT’s Rector Prof Zacharia Mganilwa.

“The main objective of our RCoE is to provide training, research and consultancy services covering all pillars of road safety within the country and the whole East Africa region.

Therefore the partnership with the US-based organisation will add value to our Centre of Excellence.”

Specifically, NIT’s RCoE conducts training of trainers for road safety professionals and experts, conduct road safety training programmes, provide state-of-the-art training facilities and learning environment for road safety, facilitates research and consultancy services on road safety.

He further said that after NIT’s lecturers are imparted with knowledge from FHAWA, East African countries will send their people to Tanzania to learn the road safety training programmes at NIT.

“What we want to see is our RCoE in road safety to become more powerful in providing training services, investigations and research in the areas related to road safety issues to all of the East African nations.

Therefore by working closely with one of the world’s organizations that has advanced in road safety, training and research, our RCoE in road safety will be one of its kind in East Africa and across the continent,” he elaborated.

He went on to urge East African countries to make a comprehensive research on road accidents. “We are failing on making in-depth research when comes to reporting on road accidents.

We remained on reporting accidents in numbers of death, vehicles involved, drivers, victims but  we have forgotten to make an in-depth report on how the accidents have happened so as to come up with the inner solutions.”

He pointed out that the number of researches will give solutions on whether to change laws and regulations in the road sub-sector.

“The results from scientific researchers will also give us chance as academicians and stakeholders to improve our curriculums to driving schools programmes,” he said.