Nairobi-Mombasa Highway Named Among World's Deadliest Roads

The Nairobi-Mombasa highway has been listed among the most dangerous roads in the world in terms of accidents and fatalities.

The 482-kilometer highway claimed the lives of 27 people in a period of eight months in 2019, according to a report by Australian insurance firm Research by Budget Direct.

“In just an eight-month period of 2019, 27 people died on the Mombasa Road to Nairobi, Kenya. During this period, 2,181 people died in total from road crashes across Kenya – and 839 of these were pedestrians,” the report reads.

The findings echo a 2018 report by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) which ranked the A109 Road as the deadliest road in the country followed by Thika Super Highway and Waiyaki Way.

Other high-risk roads named in the NTSA report included Kangundo Road, Gilgil-Nakuru, Marigat-Loruk, and Jogoo Road.

The Research by Budget Direct report ranked the Accra to Cape Coast Road in Ghana as the deadliest road in Africa. There were 6,104 accidents and 7,465 casualties on this road between 2004 and 2011.

Other notorious roads on the continent are the Plumtree-Bulawayo-Harare-Mutare Highway in Zimbabwe and Cameroon’s Douala-Yaoundé Road.  

In Europe, Ukraine’s M-06 connecting Kyiv to Chop is the most dangerous, with 757 accidents recorded last year. 

The Pan-American Highway which crosses El Salvador from north to south was named the deadliest road in North and Central America.

In the Asia and Oceania region, the Dhaka-Sylhet highway (N2) in Bangladesh is the worst having claimed 250 lives in 2020 alone.

Research by Budget Direct used data from government websites, news reports, and transport associations to generate the report.