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You may remember the 6 year road safety project that focused on making the western corridor from Belize to Belmopan safer for drivers. It has significantly reduced the number of fatal accidents on that road, and Director Best discusses the success of the first project and highlights the importance of the second road safety project.

Daniel Best, Director of Projects - CDB
"So the second road safety project has now been approved. Unfortunately, as it relates to road fatalities and serious injuries, Belize leads all member countries. This is something that we identified and we are determine that we are going to focus on with all interventions in the country. Along the demonstration corridor as we saw, we have recorded a drop in death from an average of 33 to 8. So that 150 lives saved and over 1500 serious injuries avoided over the 6 year period that this project has been implemented. And so our board of directors is quite pleased with the results that we've had. So we received funding to allow our second road safety project, a much wider area and we are going to continue this. There are many parts to this project. There is of course a training for the most high risk group which is of course the youth and young people. There is also the actual infrastructure that's been built in place ensuring adequate lighting. There is law enforcement as well. We provided vehicles to the police as a deterrent, but also post-crash care, such as persons who have been in injuries and may have experience serious injuries can get the requisite treatment in the appropriate time. This all together is really quite a fantastic project. It's one that we intend to roll out to many of our other countries. But in Belize we now have the second road safety project and it's something that we are going to keep working on."

As you heard, Belize has the highest traffic fatality rates among the CDB borrowing member states. It is also among the highest in Central America.