Capacity building for road safety in LMICs: the need for a sustainable local knowledge and research infrastructure

Abstract

Road crashes continue to be a major cause of death and serious injury for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). At the global level, 90% of traffic fatalities occur in these countries with a dramatic daily amount of 3 260 road deaths, many of whom are children. The first UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020 was designed to develop a massive movement towards a decrease of these numbers. This resulted in many initiatives to introduce the safe system approach in LMICs, i.e. to implement road safety management, make roads, road users, and vehicles safer, and improve post-crash health care. International organisations together with NGOs and universities prepared road safety guides and manuals, gave courses and webinars, introduced auditing and inspection systems, with the overall intention to build capacity in LMICs. Together these actions contributed to a variety of road safety developments in LMICs but the overall results were still modest. At the third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm, 2020, and in the Global Status report by the World Health Organization, 2023, the results of all efforts were presented and evaluated. Many countries made progress through road safety management and better legislation addressing risk factors such as speeding, drinking and driving, failing to use seatbelts, and poor infrastructure design. However, the reduction in road deaths strongly lagged behind the original goals. Continued implementation of programs and development of new approaches are needed to make a breakthrough, and to reach the goals of the 2nd Decade of Action, i.e. a 50% reduction in fatalities by 2030, and the same percentage reduction in injuries. The present position paper argues that despite the enormous amount of road safety information, which has been and is ‘sent’ to LMICs, and despite the quality and robustness of international organisations behind these programs, there is a shortfall in the scale of the knowledge and research infrastructure currently existing in LMICs, which is needed to ‘receive and transfer’ this knowledge. In order to develop evidence-based policy, LMICs need research programs that are able to transfer safe system principles to the local context and culture. Several literature overviews illustrate the lack of such research in LMICs, i.e. the limited number of programs at local universities and research institutes. Although recently initiatives have been taken in some countries, the implementation of such programs is urgently needed. Based on this observation we call on international organisations to establish a special program for the development of a sustainable road safety knowledge and research infrastructure in LMICs. Such structural local capacity is a prerequisite to translate international road safety knowledge into local guidelines and to develop an evidence-based road safety policy. Most importantly, this local infrastructure will give countries a national knowledge bank, thus providing them with an urgently needed sustainable road safety memory.