Why is Road Traffic not more of a development issue? It’s killing 1.25m (mainly poor) people a year.

January 27, 2020
If there was a disease that killed three times more people than malaria, nearly all of them in developing countries, and yet a cure was readily available, don’t you think the aid agencies would be falling over themselves to do something? So why is road traffic in some different category? Kudos to the Economist for regularly drawing attention to the
Read more >>

Why is so little being done to stop traffic killing 1.25m people per year, and costing 3% of global GDP? Good new paper.

May 4, 2017
Part of my purpose in life is to puff good new papers from the ODI, and it’s been a while, so here goes. Work in the aid business and you regularly hear grisly tales of deaths, injuries and near misses of colleagues and partners on the roads of the developing world. In Peru, I once had the disorienting experience of
Read more >>

Campaigning to Make India’s Roads Safer: A nice How Change Happens case study

July 7, 2016
A smart How Change Happens case study by David Bornstein in the New York Times’ ‘Fixes’ series (highly recommended). Bornstein looks at the advocacy of the SaveLife Foundation, set up by Piyush Tewari, a businessman, after his cousin Shivam was knocked down by a jeep then left to bleed to death by the roadside. Excerpts + commentary from me in italics.
Read more >>

Carnage on the roads v good news on malaria and guinea worm disease (and a brewing Opium War on Tobacco)

January 27, 2014
This week’s Economist resembles a reader on some of development’s top Cinderella issues (which are becoming a bit of a thing on this blog), covering road traffic, ‘tropical diseases’ and tobacco. First up, the contrast between the falls in road deaths in rich countries (deaths there peaked in the 1970s), and rising carnage in the developing world. New WHO stats
Read more >>

What if we allocated aid $ based on how much damage something does, and whether we know how to fix it?

March 7, 2013
I usually criticize development wonks who come up with yet another ‘if I ruled the world’ plan for reforming everything without thinking through the issues of politics, power and incentives that will determine which (if any) of their grand schemes gets adopted. But it’s been a hard week, and today I’m taking time out from the grind of political realism
Read more >>

Are crazy drivers as big a development issue as malaria or tuberculosis? The case for a global road safety campaign

November 9, 2011
Read more >>