J’ca embraces Kenya’s playbook to tackle substandard helmets

More than 1,600 people have been killed in motorcycle-related crashes in Jamaica since 2012, and road-safety advocates say a critical, preventable piece of that death toll is the substandard, uncertified helmets still making their way on to the local market.

Motorcyclists and their pillion passengers remain among the most vulnerable road-users in the country, with the difference between a certified helmet and a substandard one often deciding whether a crash is survivable or not.

Since the publication of the Jamaica Helmet Standard in 2026, a framework that would regulate and monitor helmets entering the country’s ports against the international certifications and standards already outlined in the Road Traffic Act, the National Helmet Wearing Coalition (NHWC), an initiative being led by the JN Foundation in collaboration with the National Road Safety Council, has been lobbying to ensure the operationalisation of the standard at the ports.

The Cost of Inaction

The urgency is underscored by what happened, and didn’t happen, in Kenya, where a national helmet standard has existed since 2012 with little enforcement behind it.

Sam Clark, head of programmes at Transaid, the UK-based NGO that supported establishing the Kenyan Helmet Wearing Coalition, said that a recent study conducted by that coalition found that the majority of helmets currently in use in Kenya are substandard and non-compliant, 14 years after the standard was introduced.

“In many cases, it appears as if some of the companies exporting helmets to Kenya are in effect taking advantage of Kenya’s lack of testing capacity,” he pointed out.

Jamaica faces a similar challenge, with no fully operationalised system currently in place to monitor helmets entering the island. To test this gap, the coalition sent 16 helmets acquired on the local market to Italy for testing. All 16 were marked as certified, but the results showed that only one met the standard it claimed to meet.

Kenya does formally operate a pre-shipment verification system, requiring third-party auditors to certify helmet batches before they leave the exporting country. But Clark said the proliferation of substandard helmets in Kenya indicates that this system is routinely circumvented and would benefit from strengthened market surveillance targeting helmets as they enter via Kenya’s ports as well as retailers, a warning Jamaican officials say they intend to heed rather than repeat.

Point of Entry

For Jamaica, the strategy centres on closing that same gap before it opens, screening helmets against the Jamaican Helmet Standard’s certification requirements at the point they enter the country, rather than trying to claw back non-compliant products already in circulation.

“We cannot afford to wait until a substandard helmet is already on a rider’s head to act,” emphasised Dr Wendell Richards, a regulatory expert at the National Compliance and Regulatory Authority (NCRA).

“Operationalising the Jamaican Helmet Standard means ensuring that every helmet entering our ports is assessed against the relevant international certifications and the requirements already set out in the Jamaican standard JS 374 and the NCRA, Standards and Road Traffic Acts. This is how we protect motorcyclists and pillion passengers, by stopping substandard helmets before they ever reach a rider’s head, not after.”

Referring to Jamaica’s progress in developing its own standard, Clark said, in his assessment, Jamaica moved faster than Kenya did, but, he cautioned that the standard alone would not be enough without sustained enforcement and private-sector accountability behind it.

“Jamaica made some really good progress in that, and it’s been extraordinarily quick, actually, which is incredible, but as you look at Kenya ... having the standard in place is the first step in a very long journey towards rider compliance,” he pointed out.

“Making sure they know exactly what’s in the standard ... and translating it into something that your average person can understand is critical,” Clark stressed, adding that awareness raising amongst riders is important so that the demand for genuine, certified helmets grows from the ground up.

Clark, who attended Jamaica’s Heads Up Regional Think Tank on helmet safety recently, said the exchange between the two coalitions has reinforced how much is riding on getting enforcement right early, rather than after a standard has already been undermined by years of unchecked importation.

With the NCRA signalling its intent to build port-level screening into its regulatory framework, and the coalition continuing capacity-building work with retailers and government stakeholders, officials on both sides of the Atlantic said the goal is the same, making sure a helmet standard is more than a document, it’s what actually protects the rider wearing it.