Financing road safety is not restricted to funding measures or interventions, but is also required to support the management activities that ensure that effective road safety policies can be defined, accepted, implemented, and monitored. Measures and activities have different life spans and generate different implementation processes, requiring also different forms of funding. The present paper proposes a classification of road safety measures and activities according to their goals, functions, implementation characteristics and life span. Following this, two financing modalities have been retained : sustainable funding for permanent or periodical activities, and funding limited in time and scope for "one-time only" interventions. A structured description of a typical road safety budget is thus established. While in industralized countries, most of the road safety budget is provided by governement funds, alternative sources of funding have to be found in the lower income countries. The paper identifies a number of sources that may provide short term funding, and possibilities to design acceptable sustainable funding mechanisms are discussed. The discussion draws from the experience of a group of African and European road safety experts including Amakoé Adolehoumé (France), Pierre Dagoury (France), Mawutoe Fatonzoun (Togo), Amadou Harouna (UEMOA, Burkina Faso), Ouafae Idrissi-Kaïtouni (Maroc), Gouali Emmanuel Yoro (Côte d'Ivoire) and the author, as well as from previous studies performed for UEMOA (2000) and the World Bank (2003).