“After Marrakech”: A new era in the push for safer roads?

By Guangzhe Chen

A challenge was set at the opening ceremony of the 4th Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety, held in February 2025 in Marrakech, Morocco: let there be a “Before Marrakech” and an “After Marrakech.”?

After having led the World Bank delegation at this milestone event, I believe this gathering could mark a turning point in the push for road safety. Now, we must take concrete actions to ensure we live up to the Marrakech Declaration and truly enter an “After Marrakech” era for road safety.?

This new era is urgently needed. We lose one life every 24 seconds on the world’s roads—a total of 1.19 million preventable deaths per year. Road crashes remain the single largest cause of death for children and young people aged 5-29, outstripping malaria, tuberculosis, suicide, and other such dangers. The burden is felt disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries, which account for 92 percent of fatalities despite having just over 60 percent of the world’s vehicles.

It was clear at the conference—which was co-hosted by the Kingdom of Morocco and the World Health Organization—how seriously governments across the world are taking this issue, with over 100 ministers in attendance. In total, 5,000 people participated, making it the largest ever gathering of global road safety stakeholders. Occurring every five years, the event took place as the world reached the midpoint of the second UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2021-2030), which aims to halve road traffic fatalities and serious injuries during this decade.?

Road safety is a multisectoral challenge, so creating lasting reductions in fatalities and injuries requires close coordination across agencies and sectors, transport and urban planners, health and emergency services, police, vehicle manufacturers, educators, policymakers, regulators, and more. If we’re to reach the 2030 target, we need all these road safety players to increase their efforts in tandem.

So, what will we do as the World Bank Group to make this “After Marrakech” vision a reality?

For one, we stand ready to increase our high level of financing for vital road safety investments globally, which is primarily driven by country demand. Since 2006, the World Bank has invested over $4 billion in road safety improvements, which has helped provide more than 65 million people with access to safer roads—equivalent to the entire population of South Africa or the United Kingdom. Importantly, these projects deliver not only financing but also impart technical expertise and know-how.

Through the Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF), the World Bank will also continue to play a leadership role among multilateral development banks (MDBs) to help boost road safety development financing. At a meeting of the MDB Road Safety Working Group at the Marrakech Ministerial—a group for which GRSF serves as the secretariat—MDBs announced they had collectively mobilized over $6 billion for road safety in low- and middle-income countries from 2018 to 2024, and project this will reach $10 billion over the next decade.

World Bank delegation at the 4th Global Conference on Road Safety. Marrakech, Morocco; February 18-20, 2025. Photo credit: Benjamin Holzman/World Bank

Despite this unparalleled level of support, development financing alone will never be enough to close the estimated $400 billion road safety funding gap—the estimated amount needed to halve road crash fatalities over the next 10 years. National budgets will make up some of this shortfall, yet many countries—particularly those with limited resources—still struggle to allocate sufficient funding for road safety.

For this reason, over the coming months the World Bank will help governments tap into an alternative source of funds: the $1 trillion annual sustainable finance market. By linking road safety initiatives with investors' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) priorities, these financial instruments—think social and green bonds—can unlock private capital for critical road safety programs. A new report jointly published by GRSF and the World Bank Treasury, with inputs from the MDBs’ Road Safety Working Group members and the International Transport Forum, provides practical guidance on how these instruments can be effectively structured and used to help bridge the funding gap.

We are also committed to deploying resources where they are needed most. This was the first road safety Ministerial to take place on African soil, a continent with the highest rate of road fatalities per capita—a sobering reality highlighted at the event. To provide a comprehensive analysis of road safety trends across the continent, the World Bank’s Africa Transport Policy Program, together with the African Union Commission and World Health Organization, launched the Africa Status Report on Road Safety 2025. The report represents a significant milestone in establishing a harmonized road safety monitoring mechanism for Africa to achieve the related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Through the World Bank’s decades-long engagement on road safety, we have also learned an important lesson—road safety management is perhaps the most important ingredient for sustained road safety improvements over the long term. That’s why we’ve updated the third edition of the Strengthening Road Safety Management guidelines, which provide a step-by-step framework to help countries improve their road safety management systems and strengthen their institutional functions. These guidelines will be supported by workshops and knowledge sharing events to help road safety practitioners tailor management systems to their local contexts.

The Marrakech Ministerial set the stage for the next chapter in global road safety. Turning this momentum into lasting progress though will require sustained commitment, strong institutions, innovation, and financing at all levels. By scaling up investments, leveraging new funding mechanisms, and strengthening road safety management, the World Bank Group and its partners stand ready to make “After Marrakech” a new era in the push to save lives on the world’s roads.