By Road Safety is a more complex issue than it seems. For an intervention to be successful, there needs to be several resources and studies put into practice adequately. This includes:
- Studies of areas with high crash incidences, what causes them, and what the appropriate intervention might be.
- Capacity building exercises to support local governments.
- Spreading of awareness to stakeholders.
- Monitoring and measuring the results of the proposed interventions.
As you can tell, there are several moving parts…this is why we advocate so heavily for multi stakeholder approaches. Through our experience, we’ve noticed that government data is often outdated or kept track of incorrectly, this is especially prevalent in low-income countries and neighborhoods. This issue can be solved by leveraging resources from the private sector. Additionally, through collaboration, government officials can receive high-quality capacity training to properly attack road safety, that they otherwise would not have had access to.
This is why the United Nations Sustainable Goal (SDG) 17 supports strengthening relations between the government and the private sector. Results need to be achieved with collaboration; one of our most successful initiatives in Brasilia where we managed to half the total amount of road traffic deaths, would have not been possible without our close work with the local government.
Recently, we launched our Road Safety toolkit with UNITAR, a guide for governments designed and crafted by private companies. It’s a milestone achievement we hope other organizations can replicate to address other pressing world issues.
We firmly believe that through collaboration and multi-stakeholder approaches, we will be able to several lives, and fix some of the world’s most prevalent issues.
What do you think?