A decade of LMIC work learned us that the development of national knowledge centers both at universities and research institutes is to be considered as one of the major issues in the coming years. A sustainable knowledge infrastructure in LMICs is needed to transfer safe system principles to local traffic situations and to serve as a longstanding road safety memory. This view is based on our cooperation with many alumni from the Delft Road Safety Course as well as on our activities in the PIARC TC 3.1 Working group 3.1.1, see report (2023).
In collaboration with dr. Henk Stipdonk (KiM Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis) and dr. Mark King ( Queensland University of Technology) , we further analyzed this issue and developed ideas for solving it. All this was reported in a position paper titled ‘Capacity building for road safety in LMICs: the need for a sustainable local knowledge and research infrastructure’. We distributed the paper widely among experts acquainted with road safety management in LMICs (representing research institutes, universities and international NGO’s).
The many comments we received strongly confirmed our vision and problem analysis. The need to strengthen the local knowledge and research infrastructure was evaluated positively but not easy to implement; it would require the cooperation of many parties, sponsoring and would take time. The position paper was published in Traffic Safety Research.
To promote the initiative Wesemann took part in the 15th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion in Delhi, India (2024). He organized a workshop on the importance of a knowledge and research infrastructure for the development of an evidence based road safety policy. The conference gave the opportunity to meet leading actors, present our initiative and collect comments. Overall the reactions strongly supported our previous findings.
Having evaluated the results of our “publicity campaign” we concluded the building of a Special Knowledge Infrastructure program is needed and to bring together a Group of Initiators. In addition we decided to explore the possibility of organizing a pilot project in a selected country.
