Growing up in Jamaica, where there were just under 500 road traffic fatalities in 2022, Nneka Henry saw how people accepted road crashes as part of life. Even though around the world 500 children are killed every day on the roads, the vast majority occur in low and middle-income countries. Now that Henry is head of the UN Road Safety Fund secretariat, she wants to make sure that this attitude changes. And one of the biggest challenges, she says, is building awareness.
“I think people don't realise that there are solutions that have worked in other countries that could be applied to them,” she says. “It's almost a human right to safer roads. I now live in Switzerland, where my children are growing up not realising that road safety is the leading killer of young people just because there are so many safe road systems in place, but that's not the case in Jamaica and many other countries.”
Putting the focus on child safety on the roads is one way to get the message across. “People understand the vulnerability of children, they understand that safe journeys to school matter, so we're hoping that this will increase awareness and engagement with the issue,” she adds. “Because while we have child-oriented projects such as safe school zones in the Philippines and child safety-belt laws in Jordan, every intervention the Fund makes around speed management, safer vehicles, road signs, post-crash care, will benefit children's safety as well.”
Key targets
The UN Road Safety Fund was founded in 2018 to support developing countries in meeting the road safety targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: to halve road traffic deaths by 2030 and improve road safety through better access and use of sustainable mobility.
Pirelli was a pioneering private donor to the Fund, with its first donation in 2018 and a total so far of $1 million. Filippo Bettini, Senior Advisor Sustainability, says the Fund is a good match for the company's longstanding commitment to road safety, particularly in the way it works with governments around the world.
“Whenever we talk of mobility, we believe it has to be safe, that is where we start, and we are very involved in promoting road safety,” he says. “We've worked with the UN with the Global Compact, the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] in 2015 and now we are happy to be part of the Road Safety Fund's activities, which demonstrate our effort and commitment to the issue.”
Spreading the message
As a member of the Fund's advisory board since 2018 and now also of the steering committee, Bettini supports the focus on child safety seen in the #moments2live4 campaign: “To build awareness of road safety we have to work on education and that starts from the cradle through the family to the next generation.”
Overall, Henry hopes the campaign will extend the conversation around road safety so it's not just “road safety experts talking to road safety experts”. The use of key people with large numbers of followers on social media is helping to amplify the message. Campaign supporters include the Formula One drivers Charles Leclerc and Mick Schumacher, sprinter Yohan Blake and actor Michelle Yeoh.
“Our supporters have influence and reach among a wider group of people than we have on our own. It's also a different set of stakeholders, which I think is important because, at the moment, the discussion of road safety is a very closed ecosystem,” says Henry. “We need more individuals, more families, more companies, more governments, understanding and engaging with the issue, and through these influencers we can achieve that.”
The target is for the road safety message to have reached 1 billion people by 2030, the end of the current SDG agenda. So far the campaign has engaged with 7.8 million people across the globe. “We will be coming back at this every year until 2030, measuring the metrics around engagement each time,” adds Henry.
The campaign is also aimed at raising more money for the Fund's projects and for the first time the pool of donors has been opened up to smaller donors, includine families and individuals. With a target of $40 million raised during 2022 – 2025, the Fund has already received new donation pledges in excess of $16 million at the end of 2022. It currently has road safety projects in 46 low and middle-income countries, but with 125 low-and middle-income countries in total, there is plenty more that needs to be done.
