SADC Road Safety Champion, and South Africa’s Transport
Minister, Sibusiso Ndebele has called on the international community to ensure
that road safety is part of the global development agenda.
Addressing high-level international road safety policymakers
and academics on 2 May, at the Commission for Global Road Safety: Policy &
Donor Forum 2012 currently taking place in New York, Ndebele said: “Every year
almost 1.3 million people are killed, and millions more injured and disabled,
on the world’s roads. The importance of including road safety as part of a new
approach to sustainable transport cannot be over-emphasized. Road safety must
be part of the sustainable development agenda, recognising the impact of road
traffic injuries on Development Goals.
We, therefore, call upon the international community to
ensure that road safety is part of the global development agenda. Transport
policy generally, and road safety specifically, has been side-lined as
development issues despite an environmental and public impact that is arguably
comparable to other major issues including HIV and AIDS and malaria. The
consequence has been lack of political attention, media understanding and donor
and government underfunding.”
“The road safety challenge has presented the global
community a ticking time bomb. Road traffic crashes have become a sheer
detriment to Africa’s development through the loss of capital, human life and
destruction to property. Africa has the highest road injury fatality rate of
all World Health Organization regions. By 2015, road crashes will be the number
one killer of children aged 5-14, outstripping Malaria and HIV and AIDS. Road
crashes are estimated to cost African countries between 1-3% of their Gross
National Product (GNP). The Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 must be
put firmly within the global development agenda. We cannot afford the economic
and human cost of inaction anymore.
“The global movement against road deaths must be
accelerated. The greatest partners in this struggle against road carnage must
be those who have lost relatives and friends in road crashes. The second group
of partners in this fight must be the very young, who are yet to acquire bad
driving habits, to whom wearing a seatbelt, not drinking and driving can still
be acquired as a force of habit. The third set of partners must be the
religious sector who shoulder the burden of burying the dead every day of the
year somewhere around the world. It is the living who close the eyes of the
dead, but it is the dead who must open the eyes of the living,” Ndebele said.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), during the
course of the decade (2011-2020), as many as five million lives could be
saved and 50 million serious injuries prevented if road safety programmes are
implemented worldwide.
The Decade of Action Policy & Donor Forum will address
the role of road safety and sustainable transportation in contributing to
shared goals for sustainable development, particularly in the context of the
forthcoming “Rio+20” UN Conference on Sustainable Development, as well as
focusing on the investment case for funding global road traffic injury
prevention.
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