In the process of synthesizing findings from the literature review and identifying areas for further inquiry, we informally consulted with ten road safety experts from academia and international road safety organizations, including local experts from Bangladesh, Nepal, Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya. For example, from a total of 69,448 studies relating to LICs, 454 studies were found to be relevant to road crashes in LICs (see Table 1). The strategy aims to limit the search to LICs (see Scopus #1), and then limit the search according to the desired topics of vehicles and crashes (see Scopus #2), road safety measures (see Scopus #3), vehicle safety measures (see Scopus #4), or vulnerable road user groups (see Scopus #5). Table 1 gives examples of the search strategy developed for this study (the example displayed having been used for searching Scopus). Search strings were generated by combining the list of LIC named countries, and other relevant search terms e.g., low-income OR road accident OR traffic accident OR road crash OR traffic crash). With respect to other topics, further relevant articles or reports, published by international organisations, were identified through online searches using appropriate keywords for each of the topics, and from discussions with experts and stakeholders. Our recommendations, which relate to both empirical and methodological frontiers, would lead to noteworthy improvements in the way road safety data collection and research is conducted in the context of LICs. Based on our findings, future research ought to focus on improvement of data systems, understanding the impact of and addressing non-fatal injuries, improving estimates on the economic burden, implementation research to scale up programs and transfer learnings, as well as capacity development. We identified ten focus areas relating to (i) under-reporting (ii) global best practices (iii) vulnerable groups (iv) disabilities (v) road crash costing (vi) vehicle safety (vii) proactive approaches (viii) data challenges (ix) social/behavioural aspects and (x) capacity building.
We focused mostly on examining the problem from traffic engineering and safety policy standpoints, but also touched upon other sectors, including public health and social sciences. Our study takes a holistic approach based on the Safe Systems framework and the framework for the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety.
With the general aim of improving road safety in LICs, this paper discusses the state of knowledge and proposes a number of future research directions developed from literature reviews and expert elicitation. This in turn will allow for planning cost-effective road safety improvement programs in a timely manner. Given the expected increase in traffic exposure due to the relatively rapid motorisation of transport in LICs, it is imperative to better understand the underlying mechanisms of road safety. Road safety in low-income countries (LICs) remains a major concern.
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