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Abstract
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‘Not a single low-income country reduced its road injury rates’, said Etienne Krug as the Stockholm Declaration on Road Traffic Safety was adopted during the ministerial conference in February 2020, marking the end of the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011–2020). It reaffirms the global character of road traffic safety which calls for international cooperation and multisector partnerships.1 The Decade of Action for 2011–2020 can most importantly be credited with putting the question of road safety at the heart of political agendas and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, the results in terms of road traffic mortality are disappointing, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs).2 The few measures adopted have done nothing to lower the number of injuries and fatalities on the roads, and the situation is still unequal. The average mortality rate is 27.5 per 100 000 inhabitants in LMICs, compared with 8.3 per 100 000 in high-income countries. Moreover, road traffic accidents are the first cause of death in children and young adults of 5–29 years of age.3
The declarations of the major stakeholders of world road safety sought nonetheless to adopt a positive stance with respect to the decade. There is a raft of interpretations of the statistics published by the WHO, asserting that the global rate of deaths has stabilised, at the same time insisting that more should be done to halve the rate within 10 years. The reliability4 of these figures is rarely questioned, particularly in LMICs. This question is fundamental, given that if we want to achieve ambitious objectives, we should be able to have an accurate assessment of change in the number of fatalities and injuries. Then again, there are numerous inequalities in the collection of data, and our 10 years of field experience show that in francophone West Africa, for example, there are no data reflecting the reality of the situation. Road safety agencies, established relatively recently (Burkina Faso and Mali: 2009; Niger: 2012), have admittedly created the conditions for standardised data gathering with their Bulletin d’Analyse des Accidents Corporels (BAAC) forms, but completeness, reliability and readiness of the statistics remain debatable.
The WHO has made attempts to correct the current statistics by proposing an estimation allowing for more realistic data. This calculation also remains debatable since it is based on other public data (eg, licensed vehicles, populations), which are also unreliable or too old. In Mali and Burkina Faso, for example, the most recent population censuses are almost 15 years old.3 This has resulted in incoherent figures being produced by WHO and refuted by national road safety agencies which are unable to counter with reliable statistics. Stakeholders, however, do agree with the fact that there are too many deaths on African roads. If the next decade aims to achieve its objective, it is necessary first of all to know where these countries stand. Only in these conditions will it be possible to evaluate the initial situations, propose interventions to reduce the rates and finally to evaluate the efficacy of the interventions in the next decade.
This alarming situation relates more to the countries of francophone West Africa which are considered to be those countries with the most worrying situations.5 These are also the countries experiencing the fewest interventions,6 few research programmes or international support for road safety. The language barrier5 presents a major challenge for these countries to access studies published in English. We therefore need in-depth knowledge necessary to identify the problems and put forward solutions, allowing for improvement in generating reliable and comparable data in four principal fields ...
Language: en |