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One of the most frequently asked questions in various travel forums is: “How safe is it to travel in XXX?”, where XXX stands for a country in Africa. Are you planning a trip to an African country and worrying about the risks you’ll take? Here I give a reference to an internet source that illustrates safety in Africa (and around the world).
International SOS has published a travel risk map on the Internet that illustrates the risks for each country.
Risks are classified into three categories:
- Health – how high is the risk of contracting the disease or how good is medical care in the country?
- Security – how high is the risk due to political and social unrest, as well as crime and how effective are the country’s structures to combat unrest and crime?
- Road safety – the mortality rate from road accidents.
In this way we can draw the following conclusions, for example, for Namibia and South Africa:
The health risk in South Africa is small – on a Western European level. In Namibia, the health risk is higher than in South Africa but lower than in most other African countries.
The security risk in Namibia is at the same level as in most European countries. In contrast, in South Africa, it is at a medium level. There are much more insecure areas in Africa, such as northern Kenya with high risk or Somalia with extreme risk.
When it comes to road safety, both Namibia and South Africa are very high-risk areas. More than 25 out of every 100 000 people die in both countries as a result of road accidents.
The risk is, of course, not the same in a single country. For example, medical care in the cities of Namibia is excellent, but it declines the further one travels to the sparsely populated areas. On the other hand, the crime rate in the city is high but not in rural areas.
Nevertheless, one can draw rough conclusions from the map.
Over to you: How do you prepare for the risks and dangers of your journey? Please tell us about it in a comment.
Anette Seiler
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