Zambia Road Safety Trust
Road deaths are rising because crashes are rising, and enforcement has not kept up
ZRST briefing | 21 October 2026
Zambia Police recorded 2,286 road deaths between January and September 2026. In the same nine months of 2025 the figure was 1,893. That is 393 more families burying someone, an increase of 21% in a single year.
The Zambia Road Safety Trust has analysed every quarterly police statement from January 2025 to September 2026. We wanted to answer a question the quarterly headlines don’t: why is this happening?
Download the full report (PDF)
Crashes are not getting worse. There are more of them.
If crashes had become more violent, we would expect more deaths in each crash. That isn’t what the figures show. Deaths per injury crash were 19.2 per 100 in 2025 and 19.5 in 2026, a difference small enough to be chance.
What has changed is the number of crashes. Fatal crashes rose 24% and all crashes 19%. Crashes rose in eight of ten provinces. Damage-only crashes stayed at about 65% of the total, so the rise is not just more minor crashes being reported.
Put simply, more people and more vehicles are on the roads, and the system protecting them hasn’t grown to match.
Enforcement has stalled
In 2025, recorded traffic offences grew faster than crashes. In 2026 that reversed. In the third quarter, crashes rose 27% while recorded offences rose just 1%. Police now record about four offences for every crash, down from five a year ago. Admission of guilt revenue fell 15%, and the average collected per offence dropped from K455 to K383.
We don’t know why revenue per offence fell, and we are not suggesting wrongdoing. But it needs an explanation, because each possible reason calls for a different fix.
Who is dying
- Pedestrians: 934 of the 2,567 people killed in 2025 (36%). Add motorcyclists, pillion passengers and cyclists, and people outside a vehicle made up 64% of deaths.
- Children: when a child is involved in a crash, the chance of dying is higher than for older casualties, 16.3% against 12.1%. Ninety-one children died in the last quarter alone.
- Hit-and-run victims: about one fatal crash in eleven is a hit-and-run.
Where this leaves the national target
Zambia committed to cutting road deaths by 30% by 2026. On current trends, the country will record between 3,000 and 3,300 deaths this year, roughly double the target. WHO estimates that police records miss about a third of road deaths, so the true figure is probably higher still.
“I’ll be honest, I expected to find that crashes were getting more deadly, because that would at least point to one cause,” says Daniel Mwamba, Executive Director of ZRST. “What we found is harder. The system is being outgrown. Another round of festive season appeals won’t fix that, and I think we owe the families of these 2,286 people more than appeals.”
What ZRST is asking for
- Speed enforcement before the festive season on the highest-crash corridors in Lusaka, Copperbelt and Central provinces. Drivers need to see it and expect it.
- A published enforcement measure. Report offences per 100 crashes every quarter, next to the crash figures.
- 30 km/h school zones, raised crossings and footpaths where children and pedestrians are dying.
- Better data. A fixed quarterly release date, deaths by road user and age every quarter, and fatal crash locations shared with RTSA and the Ministry of Health.
- A reset national target with quarterly milestones and a funded plan.
A note on the data
This analysis uses the summary figures released by Zambia Police. We found some inconsistencies, set out in the report. The most important is the Copperbelt crash figure for July to September, which more than doubled in one quarter and needs checking. We have offered to help the Police Traffic Department analyse the full quarterly bulletins at no cost. A second version of this report will follow.
Read the full technical brief, including methods and data tables: