Focus on road safety

Nepal’s inability to fund road safety research hinders innovative solutions to control accidental deaths.

Nepal’s roads are as unsafe as ever. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) 5th Global Road Safety Status Report , published in December 2023, paints a grim picture of Nepal’s roads. The WHO estimated 8,479 road traffic deaths in 2021; the Government of Nepal, however, reported 2,833 deaths in the same year, nearly three times lower than the WHO’s data. Further, figures show a 71-77 percent increase in Nepal’s absolute number of road deaths than in 2013. While the world witnessed a 5 percent decrease in the absolute number of deaths compared to a decade ago, with 108 countries reporting a decline between 2 percent and 50 percent, Nepal is drifting in the wrong direction, and the target of reducing road fatalities by 50 percent by 2030 seems far from reality.