“If you read any newspaper in India, across Africa or southeast Asia, you regularly see big stories about crashes involving multiple casualties,” said Saul Billingsley, director of the FIA Foundation, a global road safety charity. “There’s awareness that these things are happening [in developing countries], but not an awareness of how to deal with it.”
About 90 percent of the 1.2 million deaths caused by road crashes each year occur in developing countries.
Road injuries are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29, and the ninth-leading cause of death overall, according to the WHO.
Illustration: Tania Chou
These are big numbers, and the issue goes beyond the immediate impact. Every year, 1 million children are either killed or seriously injured in road crashes and miss out on an education.
If a parent is injured or killed, children often have to drop out of school to look after them or find a way to earn money, and there is a strain on health systems that are already under pressure, Billingsley said.
Globally, the development sector has been slow to recognize road safety as an issue.
“I’ve always described it as a hidden epidemic,” said Kevin Watkins, executive director of the Overseas Development Institute. “If you ask people working in international development or infrastructure planning whether they’re aware of the level of road traffic injuries and the associated social and economic costs, there is an incredibly low level of awareness.”
Billingsley blamed this on road safety not being among the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Research into road safety as a development issue fell away from the end of the 1990s, as governments, nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies concentrated on the eight key areas of the MDGs, he said.
However, the dawn of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) means that awareness of the issue now needs to grow fast. One of the many ambitious targets is to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2020.
How can such a huge problem be halved in such a short amount of time?
A group of organizations has been quietly campaigning on road safety over the past 10 years.
The campaign, coordinated by the foundation, worked to establish the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 and was instrumental in getting the issue included in the SDGs.
Two high-level ministerial conferences — in Russia in 2009 and Brazil last year — also proved to be “momentum changers” in getting road safety onto the international agenda.
Over the past few years, this group of organizations has built a rich body of evidence that shows exactly what can be done by different stakeholders to tackle deadly road traffic incidents.
For governments — both national and municipal — the need is to pass stringent laws, such as those to reduce speed limits and enforce helmet-wearing.
For example, in Vietnam, helmet-wearing increased from 40 percent to 95 percent within days of the government passing a requirement for motorcycle users to wear one, said Kelly Henning, director of public health programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has committed US$259 million to improve road safety.
Cambodia, too, is becoming a success story.
Helmet-wearing among motorcycle riders has increased from 15 percent to 30 percent overall, and from 0 percent to 28 percent among children, since a new traffic safety law came into force at the start of this year.
Sao Paulo, Brazil’s Life Protection Program — which introduced diagonal crossings, pedestrian-only zones and significant speed limit reductions — contributed to a 20.6 percent reduction in traffic fatalities in the city between 2014 and last year.
On two of the city’s busiest highways — Marginal Tiete and Pinheiros — the speed limit was reduced from 90kph to 70kph for light vehicles and from 70kph to 60kph for heavy vehicles. The city also implemented 11 “Areas 40” to reduce the speed limit to 40kph in areas with high pedestrian and commercial activity.
For passengers, evidence shows that speaking up about bad driving can help make roads safe.
From 2007 to 2013, projects in Kenya placed stickers in the back of long-distance minibuses featuring messages such as: “Don’t let a reckless driver get away with murder.”
After the first pilot (“Heckle and Chide”) ended, insurance companies released copies of their records for the previous three years so that researchers could study the impact of the project.
“The vehicles we targeted with stickers were half as likely to have an accident than the ones that were not targeted,” said Billy Jack, one of the researchers from Georgetown University who ran the study. “We also found that the number of accidents involving death or injury was reduced by 60 percent.”
A second study, Zusha — Swahili for “protest” — found a between 25 and 35 percent reduction in accidents.
Researchers now plan to increase use of the stickers across Kenya and to introduce the scheme in Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.
Car manufacturers also have a role in improving safety. They are required to meet seven minimum recommended standards set by the UN in April.
“At the moment, unfortunately, most of the major manufacturers have a policy of producing vehicles with a far lower safety standard for emerging markets,” Watkins said. “These vehicles are far more likely to result in death and injury and, to my mind, that is a dereliction of corporate responsibility.”
The foundation is supporting the Global New Car Assessment Program to crash-test cars in Latin America, India and southeast Asia and publish the results.
Billingsley hopes it will encourage manufacturers to improve the quality of their vehicles.
Donors, too, can be champions for this issue by only financing projects that meet certain safety standards.
“If the board of the World Bank were to say: ‘We’re not going to sign off on any projects that don’t meet a minimum safety standard for road infrastructure,’ that would send a very clear incentive down to project planners and governments seeking to borrow,” Watkins said. “I do think the World Bank has moved in a positive direction on this — they are ahead of the curve if you compare them with the African, Asian or Latin American development banks — but they need to move much further and much faster.”
With nongovernmental organizations, governments, the UN, researchers, car manufacturers and donors focusing their efforts, can global road deaths and injuries be cut by 50 percent by 2020?
“The target looks very daunting and it’s evident that business-as-usual trajectories would leave us a long way short of the target, but there’s such a big gap between what we can afford to do and what we’re currently doing,” Watkins said.
“It certainly concentrates the mind having a five-year target,” Billingsley said. “If it isn’t achieved in terms of total fatality numbers, it doesn’t mean it’s failed. The work we do towards trying to meet it will not be in vain.”
Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on April 9 said that the first group of Indian workers could arrive as early as this year as part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India and the India Taipei Association. Signed in February 2024, the MOU stipulates that Taipei would decide the number of migrant workers and which industries would employ them, while New Delhi would manage recruitment and training. Employment would be governed by the laws of both countries. Months after its signing, the two sides agreed that 1,000 migrant workers from India would
In recent weeks, Taiwan has witnessed a surge of public anxiety over the possible introduction of Indian migrant workers. What began as a policy signal from the Ministry of Labor quickly escalated into a broader controversy. Petitions gathered thousands of signatures within days, political figures issued strong warnings, and social media became saturated with concerns about public safety and social stability. At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward policy question: Should Taiwan introduce Indian migrant workers or not? However, this framing is misleading. The current debate is not fundamentally about India. It is about Taiwan’s labor system, its
Japan’s imminent easing of arms export rules has sparked strong interest from Warsaw to Manila, Reuters reporting found, as US President Donald Trump wavers on security commitments to allies, and the wars in Iran and Ukraine strain US weapons supplies. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ruling party approved the changes this week as she tries to invigorate the pacifist country’s military industrial base. Her government would formally adopt the new rules as soon as this month, three Japanese government officials told Reuters. Despite largely isolating itself from global arms markets since World War II, Japan spends enough on its own
On March 31, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released declassified diplomatic records from 1995 that drew wide domestic media attention. One revelation stood out: North Korea had once raised the possibility of diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In a meeting with visiting Chinese officials in May 1995, as then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) prepared for a visit to South Korea, North Korean officials objected to Beijing’s growing ties with Seoul and raised Taiwan directly. According to the newly released records, North Korean officials asked why Pyongyang should refrain from developing relations with Taiwan while China and South Korea were expanding high-level
RSS