The UN has an ambitious goal to cut road deaths and injuries by 50% in five years. Are governments and donors finally prioritising the issue? The Guardian’s Global Development Professionals explore the world’s road safety targets as established in the Sustainable Development Ageda known as the ‘Global Goals’.

“If you read any newspaper in India, across Africa or south-east Asia, you regularly see big stories about crashes involving multiple casualties,” says Saul Billingsley. “There’s awareness that these things are happening [in developing countries] but not an awareness of how to deal with it.”

Some 90% of the 1.2m deaths caused by road crashes each year occur in developing countries. Road injuries are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29, and the ninth leading cause of death overall, according to the World Health Organisation.

These are big numbers, and the issue goes beyond the immediate impact. Every year, 1 million children are either killed or seriously injured in road crashes, and miss out on an education. If a parent is injured or killed, children often have to drop out of school to look after them or find a way to earn money. And there is a strain on health systems that are already under pressure, says Billingsley, director of the FIA Foundation, a global road safety charity.

Globally, the development sector has been slow to recognise road safety as an issue. “I’ve always described it as a hidden epidemic,” says Kevin Watkins, executive director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). “If you ask people working in international development or infrastructure planning whether they’re aware of the level of road traffic injuries and the associated social and economic costs, there is an incredibly low level of awareness.”

Billingsley blames on the millennium development goals (MDGs) – road safety was not one of them. Research into road safety as a development issue fell away from the end of the 1990s, he says, as governments, NGOs and UN agencies concentrated on the eight key areas of the MDGs.

But the dawn of the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) means that awareness of the issue now needs to grow fast. One of the many ambitious targets is to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2020. How can such a huge problem be halved in such a short amount of time?

A group of organisations have been quietly campaigning on road safety for the past 10 years. The campaign, coordinated by the FIA Foundation, worked to establish the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 and was instrumental in getting the issue included in the SDGs. Two high-level ministerial conferences – in Russia in 2009 and Brazil in 2015 – also proved to be “momentum changers” in getting road safety on to the international agenda.

Over the past few years, this group of organisations have a built a rich body of evidence which shows exactly what can be done by different stakeholders to tackle deadly road traffic incidents. For governments – both national and municipal – the need is to pass stringent laws, such as those to reduce speed and enforce helmet-wearing.