A young aid worker getting ready for her first big move to a developing country might worry about falling ill with malaria, typhoid, or dengue fever, or perhaps being the unfortunate victim of a random act of violence. But of all the potential threats that this aid worker might face in her new home, the biggest is probably one that doesn't have such an exotic ring to it: a car crash.
"Road traffic accidents are the number one killer of aid workers," says Paul Jansen, the executive director of Fleet Forum, an association that promotes safe road practices around the world. "Organisations [need] to take the responsibility to protect their own people."
Statistics on aid worker deaths are hard to come by, but there is no doubt that road safety is an enormous – and growing – problem in the areas where humanitarians work. More than 90% of the 1.2 millioin people who are killed in traffic accidents every year live in low- and middle-income countries, which are home to just half of the world's vehicles. As car ownership rises, even more lives will be lost on the roads: the World Health Organisation has estimated that between 2000 and 2020, the number of road deaths in sub-Saharan Africa will rise by 80%.
And of course aid workers aren't the only ones at risk of dying in car crashes in poorer parts of the world. Donor agencies and international charities – many of which regularly cover large distances on rough roads – are sometimes involved in accidents that end up killing the very people that those organisations are meant to be serving.
"The fact that you operate in a country means that you're part of the problem of road safety," says Jansen.
"A lot of people say, 'Well, this is the way it works in India. This is the way it works in Kenya. It's an unsafe environment; we just have to deal with that,'" he adds.
But Jansen insists that this isn't the case. By better managing their vehicle fleets, aid organisations can drastically improve their road safety records, even cutting accidents rates in half, he says. The most critical step is to teach upper-level staff the importance of setting a good example.
"If a manager says at 10 o'clock in the evening that [a driver has] to go out on the road, then the driver will do it," Jansen says, adding that night-time driving is one of the major causes of accidents among the organisations he works with.
Tim Moyle, the global fleet manager for Oxfam GB, manages more than 350 vehicles around the world, which cover some 12m km annually. He estimates that the organisation is involved in about 50 accidents per year, or roughly one every week.
"That could be anything from just relatively minor bumps right up to serious accidents," he says, adding that road safety "is an issue at any number of levels – reputational, moral, and everything else."
Moyle knows of no recent fatalities or serious injuries among Oxfam GB's staff, but others have died in crashes involving the organisation's vehicles. Over the past five years, 10 people have been killed in accidents with Oxfam vehicles overseas, while another 36 have been injured.
"It's inevitable that with that sort of mileage [accidents] will happen from time to time," Moyle says.
But he adds that all Oxfam drivers are trained in the organisation's driver policy, which includes specific rules on seatbelt use, driving speed, braking distances, and rest breaks during long journeys. And as soon as new Oxfam staff arrive in a country office, they are given a security briefing that covers any road safety concerns specific to the local area.
"We try to do the best we can (a) to avoid accidents and (b) to report them and investigate them when we do have them, so we can try and get better," he says.