Road Safety Development and Awareness in Bolivia

CAF will be providing GRSF with $200,000 in funding - which will be managed by the World Bank - for the development of a comprehensive road safety program in Bolivia. The program leverages on CAF’s relation with the country’s local and federal authorities to position the importance of road safety as an enabling factor for development.

This cooperation made it possible to create the road safety action plansfor the cities of Tarija and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The institutions directly involved participated in the creation process based on a diagnosis of the city’s road safety issues, proposing actions and solutions to address the problems initially Identified. The resulting action plan corresponds to a plan previously agreed-upon by the actors and subsequently handed over to the local authorities of each municipality.

It also allowed to assess El Alto’s road safety situation, including the main difficulties the city faces in terms of participation. The city of La Paz developed an alternative scheme consistent of controls and fines through a driving retraining course, while developing a workshop on designing safer cities with the participation of various municipal entities directly involved in the design and construction of roads and sidewalks.

At the national level, recommendations were proposed for updating the transit code, with workshops and conferences held to increase road safety awareness throughout the country, as well as address the main current problems and the potential solutions to change this reality.

Other activities carried out included participation in a variety of summits, international meetings and courses on road safety in the country, in order to present the main risk factors that may affect the number of injured and deceased in any given accident. An array of regional and international best practices that have helped reduce road accidents in other countries were also introduced in these gatherings. The city, in partnership with other international organizations, such as the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI), the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Despacio and GIZ foundations, conducted a road safety course in February 2019, presenting basic infrastructure design and inspection criteria, as well as better ways of efficiently conveying safety measures.