Along with Liana Ghukasyan of the Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP), EASST’s Emma MacLennan and Poghos Shahinyan have been conducting training on how to advocate for road safety at three sub-regional workshops involving delegates from 10 countries. The training is part of the TRACECA Road Safety II project supported by the EU Neighbourhood Programme, focussing on the ‘silk road’ corridor countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
The two-day workshops took place in Chisinau, Almaty and Tbilisi, involving a total of 100 delegates from government, local government, civil society and the media. The interactive workshops aimed to improve participants’ knowledge of how to develop, plan and communicate an advocacy campaign on road safety issues. The training included work on setting goals, preparing a ‘power map,’ drafting a press release and evaluating the success of the campaign. An important aspect was partnership working – building coalitions to promote road safety aims across key stakeholder groups.
EASST partner organisations from around the region were all involved in the training and contributed actively to discussions. New alliances were formed, too, with other participants – a great outcome for the workshops. Among these, the National Road Safety Council of Armenia have signed an MOU with the Armenian Red Cross to work together to tackle road risk and disaster risk.
The TRACECA Road Safety II project will continue until early 2016. The next stage will be national, pilot programmes on ‘Safe to School: Safe to Home,” and pilot projects to increase road safety awareness.
