The United Nations High-Level Meeting on Improving Global Road Safety was held at UN Headquarters in New York on July 20-21. The figures shared by the World Bank at the summit laid bare the gap between the target of halving road deaths by 2030 and the financing currently available: roughly 400 billion dollars is needed over the next decade, while development banks project mobilizing about 10 billion.
Convened by the President of the UN General Assembly, the summit brought together heads of state, ministers, development organizations and technical experts. The meeting took place at the exact midpoint of the Second UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2021-2030) and served as a stocktaking of how far the world remains from the global target. Road traffic crashes continue to claim approximately 1.19 million lives every year and remain among the leading causes of death for young people worldwide.
Even a record budget falls short
At the summit, the World Bank and its Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) put the financing agenda on the table. According to the Bank’s figures, 7.26 billion dollars was allocated to road and urban transport projects in fiscal year 2025, including a record 945 million dollars dedicated specifically to road safety, the highest in the institution’s history. GRSF, for its part, has helped unlock more than 5 billion dollars in road safety financing through technical assistance since 2010.
Yet the comparison shared on the panel by Benedict Eijbergen, the World Bank’s Practice Manager for Transport Policy and Regulations, revealed the true scale of the problem: multilateral development banks have collectively mobilized more than 6 billion dollars since 2018, and the projection for the coming decade is 10 billion. The amount estimated to be necessary to reach the 2030 target, however, is roughly 400 billion dollars over ten years. In other words, current commitments cover about one fortieth of the need.
“Road safety must be a core budget item”
Eijbergen stressed that the gap cannot be closed by donations alone; governments need to redesign their national road safety programs and place road safety at the center of public finance and investment planning. According to the World Bank official, road safety outcomes should be treated as a core element of capital budgets and infrastructure investment decisions, not as a sectoral afterthought.
The model the Bank advocates reflects this approach: results-based financing. While conventional lending finances the delivery of physical works, instruments such as Program-for-Results tie disbursements to the verification of pre-agreed road safety performance indicators. Financing is thereby indexed not to money spent but to lives saved.
Eijbergen also laid out a concrete roadmap for countries: national strategies that are costed, time-bound and jointly owned by transport and finance ministries; dedicated road safety budget lines; systems that track and verify performance; and the private sector engaged as a partner. This framework amounts to implementing the Marrakech Declaration, adopted at the Fourth Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety held in Marrakech in February 2025.
From commitments to implementation
The summit’s closing message was directed at national governments: political declarations alone will not bend the curve. The World Bank called on countries to translate the Marrakech commitments into practice by establishing dedicated road safety budget lines, building systems that track and verify performance, and engaging the private sector in delivering safety-critical services. The institutions that succeed, the Bank argued, will be those that treat every road investment decision as a safety decision, linking spending on enforcement technology, junction redesign and safer corridors to one measurable outcome above all: fewer lives lost.
Sources: Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) and World Bank statements, UN High-Level Meeting on Improving Global Road Safety, July 20-21, 2026, New York.
