Rural Transport Safety - Time for a Broader Debate?

2007-03-26

IFRTD members in Peru, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and India have completed a series of complementary case studies to highlight the specific transport safety issues faced by rural communities in developing countries.

The studies, commissioned as part of IFRTD's participation in the African Road Safety Congress (Ghana, 5-7 Feb 2007), have been an opportunity to look beyond the road focus of the current transport safety debate. In the past few years IFRTD members have  highlighted some of the less documented transport safety issues:

• Safety from harassment, particularly for women and girls.
• safety of poor people's property, eg. intermediate modes of transport.
• Safety issues concerning the design of local infrastructure eg. water crossings, footbridges, paths and tracks.
• The implications of safety regulations on poor rural transport users and operators.
• Safety issues on community access roads.

We hope that these studies will mark the beginning of some new and exciting debate. Click here to access the studies and synthesis paper.