A Conversation with Care Kenya on the Impact of the Fleet Safety Toolkit

Care Kenya, one of the six organisations who have been a part of the first implementation of the Fleet Safety Toolkit, and who have participated in the training modules, sat down with the Fleet Forum to share what their experience with the toolkit has been, how its impacted operations and what their next steps are towards developing their own Fleet  Safety Programme.  Michael Chilla and David Abuto serve as focal points for Care Kenya's implementation of fleet safety and shared their experiences with us.

Working with the Fleet Safety Toolkit to date:
At the moment we are focussing on 4 key areas to improve - enforcement and communication of policies and procedures, training of staff in fleet safety, and vehicle hiring and vehicle servicing.  We are looking towards updating our Operations Manual according to the guidelines in the Fleet Safety Toolkit and with particular focus on the aforementioned 4 key areas.  As this manual functions like a ‘bible' within Care it will help us to improve Fleet Safety throughout our organisation.

To reinforce the Fleet Safety message, we will use the updated Operations Manual as a base to develop a Code of Conduct (CoC) for our staff that will be communicated to them and will be consistently enforced.

Fleet Safety must be a long term commitment to be effective, and in order to make sure that Fleet Safety is an ongoing process for Care Kenya, we are incorporating Fleet Safety awareness and training in our future budgeting and funding applications. We as Care feel that it is important that our staff can execute their work in a safe way and that we as an organisation contribute to creating safer roads in the communities in which we operate.

Long term monitoring and evaluation:
A key element of the Fleet Safety Toolkit is an emphasis on the importance of data gathering and evaluation of this data to acquire useful information for continuous improvement.  This emphasis is helping us to prove that the Fleet Safety Toolkit is working.   Specifically, we have set up a reporting and monitoring programme of all accidents in Kenya. If Care is involved in an accident we analyse the event, find the root cause and take corrective actions to prevent the accident happening in future. With this report we are able to have clear evidence that our efforts do improve Fleet Safety and reduce the number of accidents in Kenya.

On the impact of the Fleet Safety Toolkit:
Care is very happy with the Toolkit.   The Toolkit is helping us to implement Fleet Safety and provide us with the necessary means to make a positive impact on the long term financial and human resources in both our operations and the communities we work.

Click to learn more about the Fleet Safety toolkit and project, and to download your own copy.