THE LEADING JOURNAL IN GLOBAL CNS/ATM COVERAGE
Africa’s ICAO Safety Audit Outcomes: A Mixed Grill of EI Scores
The performance of African States in terms of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) safety audit Effective Implementation (EI) scores for the various categories covered under the ICAO Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP) is as interesting as can be. But, when juxtaposed against the current published global average (see Figure 1), Africa’s performance is nothing short of a mixed grill of the good, the bad and the ugly. This is because while some States showcased impressive outings across the board, a handful of other States fell tragically below the global threshold while a good number of other States showed disturbing inefficiencies in some of the categories covered under the audit.
In order to contextualize the performance of African States in terms of published safety audit EI scores, Air Traffic Safety Electronics International analysed and compared data published on the ICAO USOAP Interactive Viewer, https://www.icao.int/safety/Pages/USOAP-Results.aspx, using a randomly selected sample of 17 African Contracting States of ICAO, namely: Angola, Botswana, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe with the year of applicability ranging from 2018 to 2023. The audit results covered the following eight categories: Legislation, Organization, Licensing, Operations, Airworthiness, Accident Investigation, Air Navigation Services, and Aerodrome.
Out of the 17 States sampled, the best across-the-board performers (see Figure 2) are South Africa (2023 audit), Ghana (2019 audit) and Egypt (2023 audit). South Africa garnered EI scores of 100, 100, 90.91, 91.67, 92.41, 87.65, 92.56 and 87.69 percentage points in relation to the categories of Legislation, Organization, Licensing, Operations, Airworthiness, Accident Investigation, Air Navigation Services, and Aerodrome respectively as against Ghana’s 91.34, 90, 98.61, 86.14, 92.13, 92.96, 80, and 86.24 percentage points as well as Egypt’s 86.36, 90, 84.52, 75.86, 94.45, 75.95, 71.56, and 83.47 percentage points. All the EI scores are well above the current global average across all the categories.
Nigeria’s performance (2023 audit) was glaringly unfortunate in relation to the provision of air navigation services (ANS), standing at a disappointing 45.08 percentage points as against the current global average of 65.12 percentage point for ANS. In the same audit year, Egypt, South Africa, Uganda, and Sierra Leone towered above the global average percentage point for ANS with 71.56, 92.56, 66.67, and 74.79 percentage points respectively. The country’s performance in relation to the Aerodrome and Operations categories are equally below the global average scores, standing at 57.6% and 60.68% as against the current global average scores of 63.07% and 71.08% respectively.
Among the 17 States sampled for this analysis, Eritrea (2022 audit) showcased the worst EI scores across the entire audit categories, falling below the global average across the board with highest EI score of 34.48% in the airworthiness category. Eswatini (2019 audit), Guinea (2022 audit) and Liberia (2022 audit) also fared badly (see Figure 3). In the Organization, Operations, Accident Investigation, Air Navigation Services, and Aerodrome categories, Eswatini’s performance fell short of the global average with 42.86, 28.13, 36.62, 10.58 and 11.32 percentage points respectively while Guinea fell short of the global average in the Organization, Licensing, Operations, Accident Investigation, Air Navigation Services and Aerodrome categories with 25, 32, 23.76, 23.61, 4.81, and 10.71 percentage points respectively.
Quite a large number of African States fared badly in the Operations, Accident Investigation, Air Navigation Services and Aerodrome categories. Of the 17 States sampled, Angola, Eritrea, Eswatini, Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia, Tunisia and Zimbabwe failed to make it above the global average percentage point of 65.12 in the Air Navigation Services category with 41.80, 13.21, 10.58, 4.81, 45.08, 14.05, 57.27 and 56.48 percentage points respectively.
