Road Safety Capacity Building in Belarus through the development of Road Safety Master Courses

Abstract

The risk of traffic fatalities varies significantly across high, medium and low-income countries. Among the reasons for this in the latter ones, there is often a lack of road safety knowledge and political will. Road safety is a multidisciplinary topic and requires trained professionals able to identify and implement efficient measures in the areas of engineering, enforcement, education and emergency services, taking into consideration social and economic aspects as well. However, in some Eastern Europe Countries there are potential barriers to train adequately professionals, generally due to a lack of specialised training and training standardization. Such an example can be seen in Belarus where, although road safety is a key issue, it is not managed on an evidence-based approach and there seems to be insufficient funding for related research. An initiative towards increasing knowledge capacity is the Be-Safe project (EC Tempus), a joint effort between three EU Universities and four Belarusian Universities. The objective of this paper is to describe the methodology carried out in Be-Safe to develop and test for two years two 1st level Road Safety Master Courses (60 ECTS) in Belarus according to the Bologna process requirements. Initially, a User Needs Analysis was carried out to understand local conditions and needs in terms of teaching and research on road safety. The analysis highlighted a lack of research due to insufficient funding, linguistic barriers and inadequate international relationships. This isolation led to a need of updating contents and methods of courses for students as well as research topics. Then, expected learning outcomes and Masters’ curricula, one for the Technical Universities and one for the Economics Universities, were defined and developed respectively. Finally, Masters’ courses in four Belarusian Universities were tested. Quality results were ensured through a Quality Board and assessment tools to monitor the Masters’ process as a whole.