A World Health Organization (WHO) report highlights an average of 1.3 million lives lost annually to road accidents, with about 60% of these fatalities occurring in third-world countries with lower GDPs. Governments have implemented vehicle speed monitoring and traffic lights with vehicle plate recognition systems to meet sustainable development goal (SDG) target 3.6. However, traditional speed monitoring systems often need help to track driver’s behaviour efficiently or are prohibitively expensive. Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) offer promising solutions for monitoring driver’s behaviour at a lower cost. This paper proposes a cost-effective method for detecting driver behaviour using deep learning models. A dataset of 13,669 images covering a range of poses and driver actions were collected using cameras from an 8MP Samsung Tab and an Apple Air iPad comprising images categorized into behaviours such as safe driving, texting, drowsiness, and many more. Pre-processing steps include removing blurred images, annotating, and augmenting data imbalance and overfitting. Deep learning models, VGG16 and ResNet50, were fine-tuned to accept processed images. Evaluation results show 97% accuracy for VGG16 and 97.14% for ResNet50. This research underscores the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML in developing cost-effective strategies to achieve SDG 3.6, particularly in low-income countries.