This study aims to establish a common crash database for APRSO member countries based on agreed minimum set crash data elements and road safety indicators.

This study will recommend a minimum set of crash data elements and road safety indicators for APRSO member countries.

Maximum speed limit for cars on these two road types. Urban roads: these are roads within cities or built up areas (e.g. residential areas); Rural roads: these are roads that are not urban roads nor roads going between cities

This high-level meeting explores the importance of reliable road safety data to develop sound road safety policies and the opportunites for road safety benchmarking to raise road safety on the political agenda.

The Asia-Pacific Road Safety Observatory (APRSO) is proposed by a group of international development organizations, The World Bank, Fédération Internationale de l' Automobile (FIA), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International Transport Forum (ITF) and The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), with support from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the GRSF (using funding from UK Aid).

This video documents keynotes and speeches from the Road Safety Benchmarking and Regional Road Safety Observatories High-level Meeting, a high-level meeting that explored the importance of reliable road safety data to develop sound road safety policies and the opportunites for road safety benchmarking to raise road safety on the political agenda.

The Road Safety Management Capacity Reviews and Safe System Projects Guidelines have been designed to assist country road safety professionals, World Bank and regional development bank staff, international consultants, community groups, private sector organizations, and all other country partners conduct capacity reviews and prepare follow-up road safety projects in a variety of low and middle-income countries and investment settings.

The purpose of the Guidelines is to:

• specify a management and investment framework to overcome institutional capacity barriers and support the successful implementation of road safety interventions;
• provide practical procedures designed for application at a country level to accelerate knowledge transfer and sustainably scale up investment to improve road safety results; and
• ensure that institutional strengthening initiatives are properly sequenced and adjusted to the absorptive and learning capacity of the country concerned.

The Guidelines emphasize managing for results and the associated strengthening of country road safety management systems, with special attention paid to the role of the lead road safety agency in ensuring institutional effectiveness and efficiency in program delivery. They highlight the importance of addressing all elements of the road safety management system, taking a staged approach to country road safety investment, and targeting the highest concentrations of deaths and injuries across the road network.

Every year, 1.35 million lives are lost and 50 million people are seriously injured in traffic crashes. This is a continuing challenge facing particularly Low- and Middle-income Countries (LMICs) where 93% of deaths occur.   The UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020 has seen significant progress.  Nonetheless, the targets set in 2011 are far from being realized with the decade ending this year.  As we enter a next decade, it is critical to take stock of our past achievements as well as lessons learned in order to tackle this global challenge in stabilizing and reducing the traffic fatalities and serious injuries.

This Guide for Road Safety Opportunities and Challenges: Low- and middle-income Country Profiles, is a very important tool to facilitate that. It is the first data report to cover all 125 LMICs with comprehensive road safety country profiles.  The profiles present information on each pillar of road safety—management, roads, speed, vehicles, road users, and post-crash care—, to help countries and development practitioners identify challenges and opportunities, and monitor of progress. The guide gives a precise assessment on the magnitude and complexity of road safety challenges faced by LMICs and helps policy makers understand the road safety framework in context of their own country systems and performance.

Every year, nearly 1.3 million people worldwide are killed in road crashes, which have become the leading cause of death among people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. More than 90 percent of the world’s road fatalities occur in developing countries, and half of the accident victims are pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. Road accidents disproportionately affect the poor, making road safety an economic development issue. Many crash victims are of working age, and their death or serious injury too frequently leaves their dependents destitute. Governments in poorer countries have assumed they cannot act to reduce death rates until they are wealthier. However, many of today’s road safety measures can be implemented relatively inexpensively to reduce death rates, if managed correctly.

The United Nations (UN) invited the World Health Organization (WHO) to coordinate a drive to improve road safety globally. It also proclaimed a Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011–2020) to stabilize and then reduce the level of traffic fatalities and serious injuries around the world. More than 100 countries as well as multilateral development banks—including the World Bank—support the interventions.

For many years, the Bank’s involvement in road safety focused primarily on engineering aspects on a project-by-project basis. However, in 2004 the Bank and WHO produced a seminal publication advocating the “safe systems” approach successfully being used by the 34 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Under a safe system, the whole transport system—including road engineering, user behavior, vehicle safety, policing, and accident response—is optimally designed to protect people from death and serious injury.

In 2008, the Bank made road safety a pillar of its transport sector strategy and adopted the safe systems approach in one or two projects in each Region. More recently, the Bank fully adopted the tactic for all roads projects where feasible and encouraged road safety authorities to adopt this practice nationwide.

The Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) is aware of the rapidly worsening road safety situation in the developing world and efforts by the Bank's transport sector to encourage the use of best practices in road projects. This study, a pioneering learning product created by IEG in cooperation with transport operational staff and the Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF), aims to provide useful knowledge to Bank operational staff involved with road safety, to support Bank and client countries in fine tuning their road safety strategies and practices, and to support the acceleration of the Bank’s operational road safety agenda.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank jointly issued the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention on World Health Day 2004, dedicated by the WHO to the improvement of global road safety. The report’s publication signaled a growing concern in the global community about the scale of the health losses associated with escalating motorization and a recognition that urgent measures had to be taken to sustainably reduce their economic and social costs. Implementing the report’s recommendations has become a high priority for low and middle-income countries and the guidelines presented in this report have been prepared to assist this task.

The guidelines promote a Safe System approach to road safety and specify a management and investment framework to support the successful implementation of the World Report recommendations. They include practical procedures designed to accelerate knowledge transfer and sustainably scale up country investment to improve road safety results. They set out detailed steps for the conduct of country road safety management capacity reviews and the related specification of lead agency reforms, investment strategies and Safe System projects designed to overcome revealed safety management capacity weaknesses.

The guidelines have been prepared to assist country road safety professionals, World Bank and regional development bank staff, international consultants, community groups, private sector organizations, and all other global, regional and country partners and stakeholders undertaking country road safety investments.