Kevin Watkins explains why the international community must act on global road traffic injuries.
Kevin Watkins is Director of the UN Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He served for 13 years with Oxfam UK, most recently as Head of Research. He also managed Oxfam‘s campaigns on education and fair trade. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Global Economic Governance Programme, board member of the Centre for Global Development, UNICEF’s Innocenti Centre, and the Journal of International Development. The following is an edited transcript of an interview for the Make Roads Safe campaign.
Q: To what extent do you think road safety should be recognised as a development issue?
KW: “I think this an area in which the numbers speak for themselves. We’re talking about one of the biggest causes of child deaths – there are around 400,000 children and young people who die every year. Now if development isn’t about the future of our children I’m not sure what it is about, apart from the immediate suffering that this terrible crisis is causing. It is undermining economic growth in developing countries, it is overloading health systems and it’s really destroying opportunities on an absolutely enormous scale. If this were a new disease that we were talking about, if you had numbers like this from bird flu, I assure you that the world’s leaders would be jumping out of their seats and demanding action tomorrow. The fact that they allow this to carry on day in day out, year in year out, I think says something for the terrible invisibility of this problem”.
Q: You talk about ‘invisibility’ of road traffic injuries. Why do you think the international community has been slow to recognise and act on the problem?
KW: “I think we all have a lot to answer for in this and I include in that organisations that I work for, in the UN, in the UN Development Report, we haven’t attached sufficient weight to this, so this isn’t a question of pointing a finger of blame at somebody else, we all have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves ‘why haven’t we done more’? And I think the answer to that is that there are some things which are more media friendly in rich countries. HIV/AIDS, education, health, malaria and so on, these are things which somehow grab the imagination, which somehow become easily communicable. When there's a drought in sub Saharan Africa we see terrible images of children starving, of children with their bellies expanded and so on; we don't see pictures of children being hit by bikes or cars, we don't see pictures of the emergency wards in Delhi hospital or in Hanoi hospital - the suffering that goes on there. And yet the scale of the suffering that we are talking about is very similar. And I think that if we care ultimately about what happens to our children we can't stand by and watch 400,000 children and young people dying every year from this problem when in other areas we're willing to act - in areas like malaria and HIV/AIDS.
If you look at the past the numbers are bad enough, if you look at the future they become positively distressing. On the projections of the World Health Organisation, by 2015 road accidents are going to the number one cause of death and disability for children and young people above the age of four. Now this is avoidable but if we don’t take action now to change this trend the outcome is going to be that an awful lot of people are going to lose their lives. I think in any other area of international development we would see an unfolding scenario like that prompting demands for a global summit at the UN, for high level meetings between governments. We’ve had a very strong call from Kofi Annan, the previous Secretary General, to tackle this problem head on, but I think we need to start seeing these encouraging words actually translated into something tangible which is a summit that is committed to achieving real results and real policy change on the ground”.
Q: You argue that a UN needs to convene a governmental meeting on road safety, but the Make Roads Safe report also calls for the G8 to address road safety, in particular in relation to its own aid programme for roads. Is this an issue the G8 should be focused on?
KW: “It is absolutely critical that the G8 takes this up this issue and I think it's very encouraging that we've seen one G8 leader, Tony Blair, providing real leadership in this area. Ultimately the G8 can make a real difference - these after all are the world's major donors. These after all are the governments that are involved in a day to day dialogue with governments in developing countries over support for international development, for getting poverty down, for tackling the great health crises of the moment, for tackling climate change and I think what we need to see is the issue of roads and child safety really being put right at the centre of their agenda. And I think just the sheer numbers involved justifies that.
If we were talking about an epidemic that was killing almost half a million children and young people every year, I think the G8 would be interested. The G8 leaders would be going to their Aid Ministers and asking them tough questions, “what is this about, what are you doing to prevent the problem, what are you doing to treat the problem?” Now we need to see the same sort of logic applied to road safety. These are preventable deaths. We're talking about almost half a million children and young people dying each year from a preventable cause. Now let's just stop the cause”.
Q: What do you think should be done, at the international level, to prevent these deaths?
KW: “There are very practical things that we can do. The Commission for Global Road Safety has argued, I think rightly, that what we need to see is 10% of the financial commitment to the development of road infrastructure being put directly into safety and improving safety prospects for the world’s children. Now 10% may seem like a lot of money if you are a road planner or an infrastructure planner, but what I would submit is there’s a problem here with the way that planners in the past have looked at what they’re doing with roads. There’s been a tendency to look at the benefits that roads can create for economic growth, which of course you can measure in dollars and cents. Putting a value on the life of a child is a different matter altogether. And I think that if building into infrastructure contracting a 10% component for improving safety, for every life that’s saved, that ought to count very heavily in the ledgers and the calculations of what the planners are doing.
I think one of the things we have to think about here is the interest and the rights of children. Children do not sit on road planning committees, children are not present in negotiations between the World Bank, aid donors and governments but their interests need to be on the agenda for those meetings. Common sense decrees that you do not build major trunk roads where big trucks are going to travel up and down at 50 or 60 miles an hour right next to a school that primary school age children have to cross over every morning. You do not build those roads next areas where children are playing. Child safety actually matters and we need to stop thinking of roads as sites for the transmission of goods, for the travel of people and start thinking of them as something that affects the life of a whole community and the safety of children. I think putting a value on the life of a child, not a monetary value but a moral and ethical value, is really the core principle that has to be brought into this equation.
There are many other reasons why we should act. Across the UN system we’ve got agencies who are investing in clean water, in education, in health, we’ve got bi-lateral donors doing the same thing. Now for every child death and child injury that we see there is a parallel decrease in the effectiveness of aid in other areas. Children who are hurt or killed in road accidents don’t go to school. You invest money in a hospital but if half of that hospital is then filled with people who have suffered road accidents you diminish its effectiveness to address problems in other areas. And I think there are so many areas of development where the adverse impact of road accidents is a common theme in undermining what we're all trying to achieve which is a better world with less poverty, improved health, greater opportunities in education - unless we can do something about tackling that problem our progress in all of those other areas is going to be held back and that's something that all of us in the UN system and in the donor community need to think about very carefully”.
Q: The Commission for Global Road Safety has launched the Make Roads Safe campaign to demand international action. Why should policymakers and development campaigners support this initiative?
KW: “I think the Commission for Global Road Safety has done humanity a great service. Their report Make Roads Safe ought to be absolutely mandatory reading, not just for every G8 leader, but for every leader in a developing country, for everyone in a developing country who is involved in urban planning, in transport infrastructure and in other areas as well.
It's very easy in development to identify the things that we know we should be doing better on. When we see children threatened with malaria we know we should be putting in place the malaria bed nets and helping to finance that. When we see children and adults dying from HIV/AIDS we know we have a moral responsibility to get them access to affordable medicines. When we see malnourished children we know we have a responsibility to tackle the causes of drought and to put in place the feeding programmes. When you see a child standing at the side of a road, a 4 or 5 or 6 year old child standing at the side of a road, perhaps on a journey to school to take advantages of opportunities for education, when we see them scared to cross that road or facing very grave risks in crossing that road it's less easy to get agitated about - at least this isn't something that political leaders have got agitated about. They ought to get very agitated about it. I think what the Commission for Global Road Safety has done is to ask the world leaders to stand up and be counted on this problem and I would urge anyone who reads this report to do exactly that”.
Kevin Watkins was talking to Richard Stanley