JH-IIRU Team Publishes Paper Exploring Large-Scale Road Safety Programs in LMICs

More than 1.2 million people die every year in road traffic crashes around the world, with the majority (90%) of fatalities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This is despite accounting for less than 50 percent of the world’s registered vehicles. And even though the burden of RTIs is greater in LMICs than high income countries, the generation of evidence from the developing world has not kept pace with the rate of injuries. 
Recently, members of the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research (JH-IIRU) team, and colleagues from the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a paper in Global Public Health that explores the disparity in research and develops a scientific approach for evaluating large-scale road safety programs in LMICs. 

“Large-Scale Road Safety Programmes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: An Opportunity to Generate Evidence” suggests that what is often missing from road safety initiatives is evidence on the effectiveness of such programs. The paper uses the Road Safety in 10 Countries Project (now referred to at the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Program) as a real-world application of a large-scale multi-country initiative to scientifically test the road safety evaluation approaches used in the project and to generate new knowledge in the field of road safety. The paper also draws on “13 lessons” on large-scale program evaluation, including defining the evaluation scope, selecting study sites, using multiple analytic techniques, continuous monitoring and providing feedback to implementers and policy-makers, among others. 

The paper concludes that new knowledge generated from such real-world, large-scale road safety evaluations is more likely to influence local and national policy makers than externally transported knowledge. 

To find out more, access the paper click here.