Call for Decade of Action for Road Safety launched

Make Roads Safe campaign ambassador Michelle Yeoh today led nearly 2000 children through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City to launch our Call for a Decade of Action for Road Safety.

The primary school-age children seemed to enjoy the helmet ceremony and the march in the sunshine. But being in the midst of several hundred children, seeing their different personalities, their trust in what the adults were asking of them, really drove home the sickening statistic: around the world 2000 children just like these wake up every morning and by day's end they are have been involved in a road crash and are either dead or lying seriously injured in a hospital bed.

Michelle was back in Vietnam to check on the country's progress with its helmet wearing campaign and to help launch a powerful new TV ad from the AIP Foundation urging parents to put helmets on their kids' heads. Nearly a year after Vietnam's new helmet law was introduced adult wearing rates are excellent, and injury rates are falling - but it is still very rare to see a child wearing one on a motorbike. Around 12 children are being killed unnecessarily every day as a result - 4000 in 2008 alone by year's end.

Some unsung road safety champions were present, like the Danish Ambassador, who has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars from his embassy to the campaign and is a vocal critic of any backsliding. If other Western embassies in Vietnam - and in every country with road safety problems on this kind of scale - could support road safety interventions in this way the picture would be looking a lot less grim. This is what our Call for a Decade of Action for Road Safety is all about, demonstrating that if we can increase resources over a sustained period and support governments and non-governmental oganisations in delivering the measures we know work, safe road design, helmet wearing, seatbelts, speed control, then millions of lives can be saved.

The gap between...

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...

A Tale of Two Killers...

In 2000 a ministerial gathering led to a UN resolution and approval of the UN Decade to Roll Back Malaria. A few G8 summits, pledging conferences, a WHO taskforce, a Global Fund and several billionaires later, tackling Malaria is firmly at the top of the international agenda.

Quite right too. This horrible disease kills around a million people each year -mainly young children - and infects 50 million. Eradicating Malaria is a badge of honour for world leaders, philanthropic foundations and pop stars in sunglasses.

The UN Decade to Roll Back Malaria has its critics, but it can't be denied that Malaria is in slow retreat, and that a massive effort by the international community has focused attention and resources on the problem.

Which begs the obvious question: if we can do this for Malaria, which kills a million people, why aren't we doing it for Road Traffic Injuries, which kill 1.3 million, and, unlike Malaria deaths, have a truly terrifying projected upward trajectory over the coming decades?

The pictures above tell their own story, the first is of the UN General Assembly debating Malaria, the second shows an equivalent debate on road safety. Easy to tell which is being taken more seriously. (Note: each row of empty blue seats denotes a couple of countries that decided road safety wasn't an issue of sufficient importance to turn up for - unsurprisingly there's a strong correlation between absenteeism and a high rate of road traffic deaths).

So let's do a quick comparison and see if there are some major differences that would explain why action against one killer gets funded to the tune of billions of dollars and the other...doesn't:

1. Leading global killer? yes: RTIs are 10th, Malaria 12th in the league.

2. Preys on the young, poor and vulnerable? yes, both.

3. Inflicts serious economic and health burdens on developing countries? yes, both.

4. Can be tackled with simple preventative measures? yes, both.

5. Features in the 2015 Millennium Development Goals? Malaria yes, RTIs no

6. Will be the leading burden of disease for children aged 5 and over in developing countries by 2015? Malaria no, RTIs yes.

Whatever rationale lay behind the UN's decision to prioritise Malaria should surely also justify a scaled up response to road traffic injuries. This is why we are now calling for a Decade of Action for Road Safety, modelled on the Malaria Decade, and looking forward to explaining why a young child victim of a road crash should expect the same urgent preventative action by the international community as a young child who has been bitten by a mosquito...

The Road to Moscow

History suggests that grand plans tend to come unstuck on the road to Moscow. Particularly in winter.

We're hoping that this time will be different. Because in November 2009 Moscow will host the first UN Ministerial Conference on global road safety. This meeting was approved by the UN General Assembly last March (see last post) and will bring together governments from across the world to talk about -and hopefully act on - the global road traffic death and injury epidemic.

Over the next 12 months we'll be campaigning across the world to build momentum for the Conference, demanding that governments take road safety as seriously as an epidemic that kills 1.3 million people a year deserves (something they've failed to do up to now). And as we re-launch the Make Roads Safe campaign with our Call for a Decade of Action for Road Safety between 2010 - 2020, we'll post regularly on this blog to update you on progress.