Global
Data-driven Policymaking can Save Lives and Reduce Road Trauma in Eastern Partnership: The Eastern Partnership Road Safety Observatory
Overview
Fatality rates in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) are still about twice as high as in the European Union (EU27) area, triggering high socio-economic costs, estimated at 2.6% of the region’s GDP. Policymakers rely heavily on accurate data to set objectives, act, and measure progress. Still, data discrepancy in the EaP region reported at the national level and corrected by WHO has been estimated at between 14 to 22% in 2009-2019. This shows a high level of underreporting in the region presumably due to a lack of robust data collection systems that are interlinked with hospitals, police, and other actors within the countries.
IDEAS IN ACTION ⌵︎
In this context, road safety has been prioritized as a key component of the World Bank (WB) support to the Eastern Partnership (EaP) Transport Panel. Partnering with the European Commission towards improving road crash data across all EaP countries, the development of the regional EaP Road Safety Observatory is one bold step.
The World Bank jointly with the European Commission are committed, in this context, to have a close cooperation with all EaP countries since 2017. This joint work has several faces and includes a range of activities like exchange of good practices and lessons learned, analytical missions and practical tasks, workshops and capacity building, consultations, and preparatory studies, among others.
The Technical Secretariat of the EaP Road Safety Observatory will be hosted by the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development of Georgia and is involving a consortium of partners: the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University (ISET) Policy Institute as a lead agency and the Eastern Alliance for Safe & Sustainable Transport (EASST) – consortium partner.
A regional observatory serves as a formal network of government representatives and as a forum to share practices data, and information regarding road safety policies and action. But very importantly, it requires ownership of decisions at each country level.
The EaP Road Safety Observatory will support countries of the region in boosting their capacity to collect, analyze, and share reliable road crash data, with the objective to drastically reduce the number of road deaths and crash injuries in the region.
COUNTRY PROFILES ON ROAD SAFETY⌵︎
EXPERTS WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THE SUCCESS STORY
- Elena Lungu, Senior Transport Specialist, World Bank
- Gregoire Gauthier, Senior Transport Specialist, World Bank
- Radoslaw Czapski, Program Manager for MDTF, GRSF
In partnership with:
The Key Impact
-
Providing Eastern Partnership governments with access to a library of the latest manuals, guides, action plans, and other policy materials on road safety.
-
Publishing comprehensive profiles for European Partnership countries outlining crucial aspects of road safety like management, speed, and post-crash care to help regional partners and development practitioners identify challenges and opportunities as well as monitor progress.
-
Developing knowledge on the improvement of national crash data systems and helping harmonize data from the Eastern Partnership with the EU’s Common Accident Data Set (CADaS) protocol.
-
Ensuring road safety data in the Eastern Partnership countries reaches the quality and breadth of coverage to eventually facilitate a smooth transition into the EU’s CARE database.
