Making safety a core value: launch of the Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety

Today marks to official launch of the new Global Plan for Road Safety setting out a comprehensive strategy for reducing the number of road casualties globally by 50% by 2030.

The Plan describes what is needed to achieve that target, emphasising a shared responsibility for road safety by calling on governments, civil society, the private sector, funders, and UN agencies to implement an integrated safe system approach.

The Plan highlights five core areas of recommended action including:

• Multi-modal transport and land use planning
• Safe road infrastructure
• Safe vehicles
• Safe road use, and
• Post-crash response

There is a strong emphasis within the Plan on what is needed to ensure effective implementation including financing, legal frameworks, speed management, and ensuring a gender perspective in transport planning – among others.

The Global Plan has been developed by the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Regional Commissions, in cooperation with partners in the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration and other stakeholders, as a guiding document to support the implementation of the Decade of Action 2021–2030.

Over the next few weeks our EASST partners will be marking the launch of the Global Plan by organising meetings with decision makers in their countries to introduce the Plan, explain its core components, and remind governments of their obligations to ensure it is implemented.

For our partners in Georgia the Plan means:

“more cooperation between the government, the private sector, academia, and NGOs to address the issue of road safety in a holistic way. In the second decade, we expect that road safety shouldn’t be treated as a stand-alone issue, and it will be included in many different policy agendas, including economic, agriculture, child health, gender, and tourism.”

Our partners in Kyrgyzstan have described the Plan as:

“the starting point for all stakeholders for the next decade. The more partners learn about start of the Plan and responsibility for achieving the objectives of the Decade, the more results can be achieved. Our daily work in this area is our contribution to the achievement of the Global Plan. The Plan will help us remind our partners of the commitments we have made, and promote road safety in Kyrgyzstan. I would like to see purposeful activities of stakeholders and look forward to seeing the results of our joint activities to improve road safety locally and globally”.

EASST is particularly pleased to see capacity development and gender as core elements of the Plan. EASST is founded on the principle that road safety expertise should be homegrown. Governments and other key stakeholders, particularly in low and middle income countries, should be supported in developing Safe Systems relevant to the local conditions. We look forward to supporting this and other aspects of the Plan over the next decade.