Road deaths among children spiralling in poorest nations, says report

More killed every day than through diseases such as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria according to FIA Foundation
Traffic in Delhi
Traffic in Delhi, where the haphazard roads can carry up to 48 different transport types. Photograph: B Mathur/Reuters

More schoolchildren are daily being killed by traffic on the highways of the world's poorest nations than by deadly infectious diseases such as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, prompting campaigners to call for a UN-backed target to halt the spiralling numbers of traffic fatalities by 2015.

Road accidents claim the lives of 3,500 every day, 3,000 of which are in poor countries. This will rise to more than 5,700 a day in 10 years' time unless governments act, according to a report by the FIA Foundation, set up in 2001 by motorsport's governing body to promote road safety.

Kevin Watkins, the author of the FIA report and an academic at Oxford University's global economic governance programme, said the figures should be a "global wake-up call" ahead of a UN summit in New York next week. The summit is to review progress towards eight millennium development goals that focus on issues such as child mortality and hunger.

Watkins said that more lives, of those aged five to 14, were lost on the roads than to "malaria, diarrhoea and HIV/Aids". Unlike these deadly diseases, road traffic injuries were "conspicuous by their absence from the international development agenda". By failing to pay attention to road deaths, he said, the worthy ambitions of UN goals, such as universal primary education, were undermined.

"It doesn't take rocket science to work out that primary school kids should not be crossing six-lane highways to get to school … Likewise setting targets for cutting mortality rates among children aged up to five and then turning a blind eye to road deaths, one of the biggest killers of five to 14-year-olds, is not just irrational, it is ethically indefensible."

The foundation said that aid donors had put up $300m to help "refocus" national road-safety policies and budgets in the developing world. The FIA report points out that Bloomberg Philanthropies, set up by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, had donated $125m for road injury prevention last year.

The FIA report, entitled The Missing Link: Road Traffic Injuries and the Millennium Development Goals, also covers the rising disparity between developing and developed nations. While rich countries have brought down death tolls on the roads, the poor have a rising body count.

This is partly due to the increasing level of traffic. Another reason is that in poor nations road users can rarely judge what type of vehicle will be arriving in the often haphazard oncoming traffic; Delhi, India's capital, has 48 different modes of transport, that include cows, elephants and camels, as well as rickshaws, cars, lorries, buses and sports vehicles. Without a separation of traffic streams from pedestrians or the building of raising kerbs, the carnage will continue, the report says.

On sub-Saharan African highways the projected deaths are set to double, while in Europe they will fall by 36% in the next 10 years. In Ethiopia figures show 100 people were killed for every 10,000 cars.

The comparable ratio for Japan is one death for every 10,000 cars. It means that when Ethiopians use their roads "they face a fatality risk in excess of 100 times that faced by a Japanese road user", the report notes.

Rich countries have been complicit in this slaughter, the report claims. While donors such as the World Bank, wealthy nations and rising powers, such as China, have poured money into roads to assist with the transport of commodities to ports, the construction has been done without "specific legislative targets for reducing fatalities and injuries".

In Africa one of the World Bank's biggest projects is the $640m northern corridor linking Mombassa to oil-rich Sudan and the mineral wealth of Congo through Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. Yet the money has been made available with no "reference to targets for cutting road deaths … project documents for most of the major donors in the road sector [in the developing world] are similarly silent on provisions for road safety".

Watkins said that road deaths and injuries were not accidents but caused by the criminal neglect of road safety; governments and aid donors needed to stop measuring the success of their policies in kilometres of roads, and start thinking about the safety of road users.

Another factor was that often well-meaning safety legislation had little effect in countries where seat belts were rarely worn and where no one could anticipate with any certainty the behaviour of the average road user.

Campaigners in the developing world backed the FIA report, saying poorer nations' governments needed to step in and enforce laws.

Olive Kobusingye, a Ugandan physician who was the World Health Organisation's injury specialist for Africa, said there needed to be a range of new safety measures, such as air bags in all new cars and an obligation for motorcyclists to wear helmets. "The point of making this a millennium development goal is that even if the goal is missed there is still pressure on the government to make progress to achieve it. How else can we hold governments to account?"

Driving facts

Of the 3,500 people who will die on the world's roads today, around 3000 will live in a developing country and at least half will be a pedestrian or vulnerable road user who is not driving a car.

Only half of the countries have a motorcycle law requiring both riders and passengers to wear helmets.

While most countries have laws prohibiting drunken driving, 49% stipulate a legal limit above that recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Speed is a key risk factor for injury among pedestrians and cyclists, yet fewer than one-third of countries meet basic criteria for reducing speed in urban areas, and most have urban speed limits in excess of Britain's 30mph, which is considered "low risk".