UNESCAP, the regional arm of the UN for Asia Pacific, held a road safety experts meeting today at their headquarters in Bangkok to discuss how to implement a ministerial commitment made in 2006 to save 600,000 lives by 2015. Attending the meeting were representatives of more than 20 countries from the region, and in amongst the usual narrow-focused bureaucracy from some countries present there was clearly a lot of enthusiasm for the target and for road safety interventions. But the discussion between the officials demonstrated that getting Ministers to sign up to a declaration at a big conference is the (relatively) easy bit. Translating rhetorical flourishes in a post-meeting photo op into genuine strategic cooperation and real financing and action on the ground is rather harder. The fate of successive bold declarations and targets by Afrian transport and health minsiters is a case in point...what exactly is happening to implement the African Union's 50% fatality reduction target by 2015?
The graph above shows what we could potentially achieve if we can turn a strong Ministerial Declaration in Moscow into a sustained action plan over a decade. Some will argue that the red and blue lines reflect the gap between hope and reality. The response should be that the gap also represents the millions of real people whose lives we have the power to save if we can turn hope into action...
