Dr Nii Oakley Quaye Kumah, Deputy Minister of Roads and Highways on Monday called on road safety experts to participate in the national sensitisation and enforcement efforts to reduce overloading of heavy duty vehicles.
He said the practice was prominent on transit corridors to neighbouring landlocked countries.
He explained that overloading was a road safety issue because it had devastating effects and contributed to the rapid wear and tear of road infrastructure and inefficient operation of vehicles.
Dr Kumah made the call at the opening of a three-day validation workshop of the technical reports on consultancy services for road safety on the Tema-Paga-Ouagadougou-Bamako corridor under the West African Economic and Monetary Union Ghana Road Programme One in Accra.
The project is the first programme under the New Partnership for African Development's in the West African Sub-Region to improve road
infrastructure and transit facilitation along the Tema-Ouagadougou-Bamako transit corridor.
The participants from Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali discussed a road safety study undertaken by Ghana on the entire corridor from Tema through
Ouagadougou to Bamako to make it safer.
Dr Kumah noted that transportation was the major catalyst for promoting regional co-operation and integration and could also be a means for improving the competitiveness of economies of countries.
He said evidence from countries around the world indicated a strong relationship between transport facilitation and international trade since transport cost was a key determinant of trade competitiveness.
Dr Kumah reiterated Ghana's commitment to the development of the various transit corridors linking other West African countries, to
facilitate the free movement of goods, services and passengers.
"Effective implementation of road safety measures therefore plays a paramount role in our desire to enhance the movement of goods, passengers and services within the sub-region," he said
The Deputy Minister said the Road Safety Study should remind the participants that in attempting to improve safety on individuals,
comprehensive safety could be achieved if the regional outlook was not taken into account.
He said Ghana was continuously making interventions to major sub-regional and national road projects to ensure their safety because "road safety is a national as well as sub-regional issue".
Dr Kumah urged the participants to come out with practical actions that would contribute to making the Tema-Ouagadougou-Bamako road corridor
safer to serve as a model for similar projects.
The study included production of a road safety improvement framework on the nature of road safety problems along the corridor; production of a Road Safety Action Plan that would identify key hazardous or accident prone
locations and outline interventions and measures for addressing predominant accident causative factors.