[afro-nets] UN Agency (WHO) to prepare manuals to tackle huge human and economic costs of traffic accidents (2)

["Sam Lanfranco" <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

UN Agency (WHO) to prepare manuals to tackle huge human and economic costs of traffic accidents (2)
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WHO/UNRSC Traffic Accident Prevention Collaboration Initiative
Comment by: Sam Lanfranco, York University, Canada

On the surface it would look like this initiative from the World Health Organization and the UN Road Safety Collaboration is a good idea. However, on reflection it might very well be a bad idea for a very standard reason.

Good policy and good implementation involve both doing the right thing, and doing it the right way. Pointing out the terrible human and economic costs of traffic accidents is not, in and of itself, a justification for this or any other initiative, policy or implementation process designed to reduce traffic road accidents.

The right thing, of course, is to reduce this terrible carnage. Doing it the right way (read efficient and effective) is another challenge altogether. Traffic accidents were not ?discovered? by WHO or the UN Road Safety Collaboration, and thousands, if not tens of thousands of person years have been devoted to creating approaches that address the issue  and provide guidance on how to design, implement and evaluate related policies and programmes. In a parallel with the causes of poor health, many of the causes of accidents have to do with ?the social determinants of traffic accidents? (poverty as an obstacle to simple things like helmets, seat belts, road signage, decent roads, etc), and not just the absence of good information, or well meaning policies.

The wrong thing here is a strategy that addresses the problem in a top down fashion, spending considerable resources on expensive WHO/UN level expertise to create manuals and similar ?how to? guides to the design, implementation, and evaluation of policies and programmes. These ?deliverables?, as resources,  for the most part exist somewhere in the world, and -also- for the most part are knowledge that only works in context.

The right thing here is to recognize, and draw on, the fact that much of the needed knowledge already exists, somewhere in the world, along with lessons learned about what works, or doesn't work, in particular contexts.

Might not a more efficient and effective strategy be for WHO and the UN Road Safety Collaboration (UNRSC) to mount a Traffic Accident Prevention Wiki (TAPwiki), or distributed network of Wikis, where both WHO and UNRSC can post work in progress -AND- the rest of the world's traffic accident prevention community can join in to share knowledge, critique the WHO/UNRSC efforts, and collaborate in building with what is known in the design of approaches that work.

Information and communications technologies, and application advances (e.g. Wikis in this case) have changed how things can be done, especially when it comes to knowledge networking. A top-down collaboration by WHO and UNRSC would be less effective and more costly than a more open collaboration using the available electronic venue tools that are already at hand. Let's do the right thing right!

Sam Lanfranco 
mailto:Lanfran@yorku.ca