By Prosper Makene
National Institute of Transport (NIT) is in talks with the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the United State of America to set major collaborations in research, and technology transfer.
The FHAWA’s cooperation with NIT would help the Institutes’ Regional Center for Excellence in Road safety (RCoE) to become an agent of change in road safety at a regional level.
“As 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 Institutes’ Regional Center for Excellence in Road safety RCoE) to be imparted with knowledge from FHAWA,” says NIT’s Rector Prof. Zacharia Mganilwa.
Prof Mganilwa added: “The main objective of our Regional Center for Excellence in Road Safety (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 organization 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 programs; 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 will benefit from FHAWA, East African countries will send their people to Tanzania to learn the road safety training programs at NIT.
“What we want to see is our Regional Centre for Excellence 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 Regional Centre for Excellence in Road safety will be one of its kind in East Africa and across the continent,” the Rector 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 research 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.
FHWA is an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation that supports State and local governments in the design, construction, and maintenance of the Nation’s highway system (Federal Aid Highway Program) and various federally and tribal owned lands (Federal Lands Highway Program). NIT is a public higher learning institution established in 1975 as training wing of the then National Transport Corporation (NTC).
NIT was charged with the responsibility of strengthening human resource capabilities of transport operatives and middle level managers of subsidiary companies of NTC. These subsidiary companies were: National Bus Services Limited (KAMATA), Usafiri Dar es Salaam Limited (UDA), Regional Transport Companies (RETCOs) etc.
National Institute of Transport is the only such training Institute in Sub- Saharan excluding South Africa, mandated by the government of United Republic of Tanzania to offer training in transport and communications.