Giving Compass' Take:

• Duncan Green at Oxfam Blogs analyzes a new paper from ODI which explains the importance of road safety and the need for action. According to ODI, traffic collisions are the leading cause of death for young people globally, killing 1.25 million people each year and injuring another 50 million.

• Is road safety an issue involving the government and infrastructure or does it fall more under the category of personal responsibility? Beyond policymaking, what can funders do to make save lives in this area?

• Read more about the growing issue of road traffic injuries.

There’s a form of casual violence that kills 1.25 million people a year (3 times more than malaria) and injures up to 50 million more. 90% of the deaths are of poor people (usually men) in poor countries. No guns are involved and there’s lots of things governments can do to fix it. But you’ll hardly ever read about it in the development literature, although road safety did make it into the Sustainable Development Goals (as did everything else, it has to be said) – targets 3.6 and 11.2 for SDG geeks.

So hats off to ODI for not only painstakingly building the case for taking action on a major cause of death and misery in poor countries, but also exploring the politics and institutions that so far have prevented governments from taking action.

I’ve just been reading the overview report of its Securing Safe Roads project, and it’s a model of its kind. Succinct, politically savvy and well evidenced, based on case studies from one municipal disaster zone (Nairobi), one city that’s made big strides (Bogotá) and one that lies somewhere in the middle (Mumbai).

Read the full article about reducing carnage on the world's roads by Duncan Green at Oxfam Blogs.