82 / 185
Improving Road Safety
in the OIC Member States
72
Arab Region
In the Arab region
(Table 17)Djibouti, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen consistently score low
across all pillars and aspects. Kuwait, Oman and Qatar score high on the Pillar Road Safety
Management but lower on most other aspects. The United Arab Emirates appears to be the
closest to applying the principles of the Safe Systems Approach. However, even though these last
mentioned countries, which are graded as high income countries, appear to practice good safety
management, they still have mortality rates far exceeding that of other high income high
countries and even that of many medium and low income countries (See chapter 5). Given that
some of these countries have experienced moderate to high economic growth in the past 20
years, paired with growing vehicle ownership and resulting in significant investment in road
infrastructure, it is expected that road crashes will increase in the coming years unless these
countries invest in the other pillars supporting the Safe Systems philosophy. Similar trends to
this were witnessed in Europe where traffic fatalities peaked at about the same time major
investments were made in road infrastructure improvements and supporting road safety
policies.
Table 17: Rating of OIC countries in the Arab region
Arab Group
WHO
data
Safety Mngt
(Inst. Fmwk)
Roads and
Mobility
Vehicles
Road
Users
Post-
Crash
Care
Road
Safety
Data
Algeria
4
3
2
4
2
1
Bahrain
3
3
2
3
2
4
Comoros
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Djibouti
1
1
2
2
1
1
Egypt
3
2
5
4
3
2
Iraq
2
3
N/A
1
3
3
Jordan
3
3
N/A
2
3
2
Kuwait
5
3
2
2
2
1
Lebanon
1
2
2
3
3
1
Libya
3
2
2
1
2
2
Mauritania
4
3
N/A
1
2
1
Morocco
4
5
2
4
2
2
Oman
5
5
2
4
3
4
Palestine
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Qatar
5
5
2
2
3
1
Saudi Arabia
4
4
N/A
1
3
3
Somalia
2
1
2
1
2
1
Sudan
3
2
2
2
2
1
Syria
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Tunisia
3
1
2
3
2
2
UAE
4
5
2
4
3
2
Yemen
1
3
2
1
3
1
Note: A weighting was applied to the WHO data to derive the above summary scores in each pillar. These are based
on the number of Yes/No responses per Pillar; the proportion of 2-wheeled vehicles in the population, the number
of traffic laws applied etc. as shown in Appendix 3. A score of 1 is poor and 5 is excellent.