We recently featured the campaign, “Heroes drive in pajamas”, a campaign targeting young drivers in Solvenia. The campaign focuses on encouraging young people to be picked up from nights out, even if their parents are in pajamas. The innovative campaign shared the responsibiity of young people getting home safely, focused primarily on youth who have been drinking or are under the influence of other substances.

The glamorous awards ceremony is already 27 years old. The Slovenian Advertising Festival (SOF) has awarded a Golden Award in group “direct communication for the initiative of reducing drink driving among youth” to Heroes drive in pajamas by Zavod VOZIM and partners; insurance company Generali zavarovalnica, Toyota S.

Improved road traffic safety among youth in Slovenia
The project “Heroes drive in pajamas” was a result of integrated cooperation of all national and local co-creators from the area of road traffic safety and public health. Results reflected in improved road traffic safety among youth (aged 15 – 24) in 2017 comparing to the year 2016:

• by 28% reduction of DUI among youth,
• by 27% reduction of road traffic accidents due to alcohol, caused by young drivers.*

The year 2017 was, from the point of view of road traffic safety, one of the most successful in the last 60 years, but claim they still need to work more on this, in order to improve the level of road traffic safety even more. Please have a look at how we contributed to this.

Source Police, Ministry of the Interior (Republic of Slovenia)

Case video “Heroes drive in pajamas”

Future plans
Zavod Vozim started with the holistic initiative last year in three Slovenian regions. The structured dialogue between the youth and the ones responsible for road traffic safety and in the local area, Slovenian Traffic Safety Agency (AVP) and National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ), led to the implementation of concrete proposals for improving the road traffic safety among youth.

The emphasis was also on activating the parents with driving in pajamas for the wider safety of their children.

In the year 2018, heroes are moving forward to next regions, for our purpose is to visit the whole Slovenia! Take a look at where they are going this year:

Regions in 2017: Savinja, Gorizia, Lower Sava
Regions in 2018: Carinthia, Mura, Upper Carniola, Littoral-Inner Carniola
 
We can all be heroes and contribute to improving road traffic safety among youth! How? With a heroic example in the middle of the night pick up our children and their friends and with that take care of their safety (and the safety of others).

READ MORE ABOUT HEROES IN PAJAMAS BY ZAVOD VOZIM

The 25th Meeting ofthe United Nations Road Safety Collaboration (UNRSC) takes place on 12-13 April 2018 at the United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA.

Meeting objectives:
1. launch the United Nations Road Safety Trust Fund.
2. discuss implementation of the UNGA resolution.
3. discuss current and future activities of the UNRSC project groups.
4. review membership requests and provide updates on UNRSC partner activities.

It has been a decade since the UN World Youth Assembly for Road Safety, which marked the first UN Global Road Safety Week in May 2007. Back then, road traffic crashes were proclaimed to be the number one health concern to young people globally, with over 1000 young lives lost on our road daily.

Ten years later, the reality remains and in some places, road traffic crashes have increased. The youth of the world continue to pay the highest price for mobility and it is clear that there are gaps in the road safety system. That is why we are ramping up new efforts to include youth.

Reflecting on 2017, major milestones have been achieved. We successfully facilitated the design and delivery of the Fourth UN Global Road Safety Week in May under the leadership of the World Health Organization and in partnership with the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration. The theme of #SlowDown culminated in one of the most successful UN Road Safety Week so far.

In South Africa, we worked with our Founding Member Michelin and the Global Road Safety Partnership to deliver the first South African Youth Ambassadors Training. We trained 20 passionate youth leaders who will disseminate strategic road safety messages in their communities.

In August, we continued our partnership with the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety to deliver the second Alliance Advocates training at the FedEx Global Headquarters in Memphis, USA. 15 NGO leaders from across the world underwent our intensive but interactive advocacy training and have already embarked on enacting change in their home countries.

In 2018 we will continue our work in South Africa and have already delivered a regional Alliance Advocates programme in Africa. In 2018, you can expect to see new thinking in terms of youth participation in road safety through our papers as well as our continued work to empower youth in road safety.

Finally I want to thank all of our sponsors, youth champions, supporters and friends around the world for another fruitful year of collaboration.

Floor Lieshout
Executive Director

READ OUR PREVIOUS ANNUAL REPORTS

Youth and road safety issues are a specialized area of focus but like many social action campaigns, road safety requires a good knowledge base to get started. From statistics to evidence, we host a lot of information about youth and road safety issues on our website that can give you the lowdown on nearly everything you need to know to get started in the field. 

Feel passionate about road safety but don’t know where to start? We have lots of resources on our website that can give you the helping hand to get going. Check out some of our features below.

Our Action Kit is the backbone of the work we do to empower young people in road sa

fety. All around the world, youth who have been affected by road traffic crashes or want to take real action have pick

ed up the Action Kit as an effective starting point. Our groundbreaking workshops were built from the concepts in the Action Kit and is given out to every youth that experiences a workshop.

There are hundreds of reports out there that offer an insight into road safety, many of them 1000 pages long and scattered over different risk factors, regions and themes. For a young person wanting to learn about road safety, tackling all these reports would be a daunting task! That’s why we have done it for them. We condensed reams of information into easy, bitesized and youth-friendly chunks to make it easy for young people to grasp the global road safety crisis facing young people, why youth are at particular risk, the key risk factors and how they can get started.

The Action Kit has been written by and for young people, reviewed by experts and endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

DOWNLOAD THE ACTION KIT IN ENGLISH