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Workshop: Assessing Social Equity and Social Accessibility of Transport Systems for PWDs in Nairobi, Kenya
July 25, 2023 @ 2:00 pm – 4:20 pm Nairobi
About the Workshop
The International Road Federation (IRF) was pleased to support the School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham, who organised together with the Kenya National Highways Authority, the workshop “Assessing Social Equity and Social Accessibility of Transport Systems for PWDs in Nairobi, Kenya”.
Transport is vital to the well-functioning of economic activities and a key to ensuring the social well-being and cohesion of populations. Transport ensures the everyday mobility of people and is crucial to the production and distribution of goods. Unfortunately, the world’s transport systems experience difficulties to fulfil their roles, particularly in adhering to the social equity and social accessibility principles, without which transport systems are partly a failure. This concerns both the global north and global south transport systems.
Social equity is a set of road practices and policies that ensure a consistent and systematic fair and just road transport system in aspects including fair and just mobility, access to road transport, and the costs for road infrastructure and road transport to meet the needs of road users and citizens.
Social accessibility refers to the attribute of transportation infrastructure and systems that enables mobility with affordable effort in terms of cost and time, and within different users’ contexts of physicality, location, economic, social, gender, and age amongst others. Obviously, vulnerable groups of transport users such as people with disabilities (PWDs) carry the heaviest burden of transport systems lacking social accessibility and social equity principles.
To this end, the workshop used a case study of Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss the experiences and challenges faced by PWDs in transport systems. This case study is part of an ongoing PIARC special project on Social Equity and Social Accessibility in transport systems; undertaken by the School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK. The workshop brought together academics, researchers, professional engineers, transport operators, vulnerable groups advocates, and other stakeholders in a debating platform to share the findings and foster social equity and social accessibility of PWDs in the Kenyan transport systems.
Presentations and recording can be found below.