iRAP is supporting the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) in Phase 3 of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS). Phase 3, which runs from 2020 to 2025 builds on success and impact of the RS10 phase (2010 – 2014) and the BIGRS phase 1 (2015 – 2019), which together saved up to an estimated 312,000 lives and prevented up to 11.5 million injuries.

GRSF will continue to support governments to adopt safer road infrastructure designs and improve existing road network to accommodate all road users. In addition, GRSF will conduct assessments of high-risk roads, provide recommendations for improvement, provide technical guidance on speed management, and support governments to adopt crash data management systems.

iRAP’s role will include:

• Providing quality reviews on the use of the iRAP methodology and knowledge sharing;
• Dissemination of road engineering best practices, the iRAP methodology and management of the iRAP projects;
• Contributing to the development of the GRSF Speed Management Hub; and
• Reviewing and updating the Road Safety Toolkit with the latest knowledge and research.

Three global dissemination webinars will be modelled on the highly successful World Bank and iRAP Helping Save Lives on Indian Roads Webinar Series that was delivered in June 2020. The series attracted 670 registrations from 77 countries. The first global dissemination webinar series, Helping Save Lives in Latin America, will be held on 2, 3, 9 and 10 December 2020 and is now open for registrations.

15 countries are participating in BIGRS in 2020-2025, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam.

During the 2015-19 phase of BIGRS, iRAP worked with the GRSF and cities and countries to star rate over 15,300km of existing roads, assess 6,600kms of road designs and complete nearly 1,800km of post construction assessments. The work supported 24 World Bank-financed projects that involve investments of more than USD 8 billion. More than 10,000 people from government agencies, partner organisations, institutes, the private sector and non-government organisations participated in training, workshops and presentations on Road Safety Engineering, road safety data and iRAP, including the popular online training courses that iRAP introduced at the end of 2018.

BIGRS has dedicated $259 million over 12 years to implement interventions that have been proven to reduce road traffic fatalities and injuries in low- and middle-income countries. Read more on the Initiative here.

More information on World Bank’s 2020-25 BIGRS Partnership can be found here.