Fire Safety Challenges in East Africa

More than 80 percent of the world's population lives in low-and-middle income countries, according to the World Bank. In these nations, it's often a huge challenge to find the resources needed to build the systems of safety that people in higher-income countries take for granted. To put it in perspective, in the African nation of Uganda, there are just two fire trucks and 12 firefighters per million residents. In contrast, the U.S. has more than 1,000 firefighters and 200 fire trucks per million residents. Today on the podcast we talk to Samuel Nikoma, a fire safety advocate in Uganda who has an ambitious goal of slashing the fire deaths there in half. We discuss Eastern Africa's significant fire safety challenges, and how he is trying to build more awareness and grassroots efforts to start addressing them. LINKS: Read an NFPA Journal cover story from 2021 about the enormous population growth expected in Africa over the next decade, and the fire safety challenges—and opportunities—that these trends present. Visit Samuel Nikoma's Linkedin page where he writes on the challenges of fire safety in Africa and his ideas for building the resources to address them.

You can listen to Fire Safety Challenges in East Africa online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Fire Safety Challenges in East Africa is an episode from NFPA Journal Podcast by NFPA.

This episode is 32:01 long.

This episode was published on Jul 22, 2025.

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