Each year, around 1.24 million people die in road traffic accidents. A disproportionate number of road traffic deaths (90 per cent) occur in low- and middle-income countries, despite the fact that those countries contain only 54 per cent of the world’s motor vehicles. Most of those deaths are due to the lack of basic safety measures and proper road safety management. In addition to the loss of lives, road crashes cost developing countries between 2 and 5 per cent of their gross domestic product, undermining efforts to reduce poverty and accelerate sustainable development. The lack of road safety has a disproportionate impact on the poor and most vulnerable citizens.

Through this project, ECE contributed towards reversing that trend. The project involved delivering road safety performance reviews that mapped gaps and identified priority areas for road safety management in four countries with the highest mortality and motorization growth rates in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific, helping those countries to design targeted policy interventions. The beneficiary countries used the resulting findings and recommendations to update national road safety management policies and initiate remedial priority actions, such as adopting national road safety action plans. In 2017, the Special Envoy for Road Safety initiated two further road safety performance reviews in two countries in Africa, to which ECE contributed its expertise.