Thanks CE team! I was chatting to a driver here in Freetown today about this. He thought that enforcement would be a big barrier (as you say in the summary). It’s common for drivers to pay bribes to police officers—for example, if you’re caught drink-driving, apparently you can usually pay some money and then continue on your way. You can even buy a driving license without taking any kind of driving test.
He also said that they don’t have a law about wearing a motorcycle helmet at the moment because of ebola and covid making it unsafe to share a helmet?
Hi Clare—thanks for your response! Yeah, I do think enforcement really is the main concern for this intervention, and the experts we spoke with also mentioned that bribes are common in the areas where they have worked (mainly Sub-Saharan Africa).
As mentioned in the report we have tried to somewhat get around this issue in our country selection by selecting countries that seem to have good enforcement of other road traffic safety laws (either from eg. the percentage seat-belt or helmet wearing rate or from the average rating given to the enforcement mechanisms of that country by different stakeholders of that country). This definitely isn’t totally bypassing the issue, though, and these numbers can only tell us so much. This is definitely the limitation of the desktop research we do and we will stress the importance of country scoping visits to the founders of this charity so they can better get a sense of what things are like on the ground and hope that they can find a country where these enforcement issues seem surmountable.
Re the motorcycle helmet law: That’s interesting! We did consider motorcycle helmet laws but ultimately ruled them out in favour of speed limits and seat belt laws as they seemed more scalable (a bigger issue in more countries).
Thanks CE team! I was chatting to a driver here in Freetown today about this. He thought that enforcement would be a big barrier (as you say in the summary). It’s common for drivers to pay bribes to police officers—for example, if you’re caught drink-driving, apparently you can usually pay some money and then continue on your way. You can even buy a driving license without taking any kind of driving test.
He also said that they don’t have a law about wearing a motorcycle helmet at the moment because of ebola and covid making it unsafe to share a helmet?
Hi Clare—thanks for your response! Yeah, I do think enforcement really is the main concern for this intervention, and the experts we spoke with also mentioned that bribes are common in the areas where they have worked (mainly Sub-Saharan Africa).
As mentioned in the report we have tried to somewhat get around this issue in our country selection by selecting countries that seem to have good enforcement of other road traffic safety laws (either from eg. the percentage seat-belt or helmet wearing rate or from the average rating given to the enforcement mechanisms of that country by different stakeholders of that country). This definitely isn’t totally bypassing the issue, though, and these numbers can only tell us so much. This is definitely the limitation of the desktop research we do and we will stress the importance of country scoping visits to the founders of this charity so they can better get a sense of what things are like on the ground and hope that they can find a country where these enforcement issues seem surmountable.
Re the motorcycle helmet law: That’s interesting! We did consider motorcycle helmet laws but ultimately ruled them out in favour of speed limits and seat belt laws as they seemed more scalable (a bigger issue in more countries).