The Child Health Initiative (CHI) has played a prominent role in the Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development, issuing a strong call for safe and healthy journeys to school for every child worldwide.

The global festival, held in Bonn from 21-23 March, is the main event set up by the UN Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign aimed to help drive progress towards the global goals.

The audience in Bonn and worldwide on the UN TV webcast, was presented with the realities of the journey to school for children in many low- and middle-income countries around the world. The story of Cecilia Chibulunje was featured at the start of the session. She lives in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with her family earning little over $2 a day.

Cecilia who is now 10 years old, was hit by a speeding motorcycle just a few metres from her school gate. She suffered head injuries and missed a significant amount of schooling. Fortunately, Cecilia was eventually able to return to school but her education has suffered greatly and her family has been plunged further into poverty. This, as the audience was told, is a story repeated across the developing world thousands of times each day with road traffic injury a major global health burden for children aged 10 and over.

In an example of the action that can be taken to address this crisis, the panel presented a school area road safety assessment and improvement which had recently been carried out by the Amend NGO and International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) in a similar community to Cecilia’s, in Lusaka Zambia.

The panel included: Dr. Margie Peden, Senior Research Fellow at The George Institute for Public Health, Simon Kalolo, Amend NGO Senior Programme Officer from Dar es Salaam, Julio Urzua Director Americas & Caribbean International Road Assessment Programme; Tatiana Mihailova, Executive Director of the Automobile Club of Moldova and representative of EASST; Prarthana Borah, India Director Clean Air Asia and Bright Oywaya, Executive Director of ASIRT.

The participants gave evidence of the burden of road traffic on children, highlighting how injury and toxic air are combining to damage the health and development of millions of children worldwide. They presented the solutions to address these issues, and called for greater collaboration with those implementing the SDGs in order to improve child health and uphold child rights.

FIA Foundation Deputy Director Avi Silverman moderated the panel. He said: “Delivering the SDGs for children around the world must be upheld as a core priority of the global development agenda. However, we will not be able to achieve anything if the major threats and burdens that children face are not addressed. Road traffic injury, the number one global killer of older children must not go ignored by the development community. As the panel highlighted, safe streets and clean air for young people are non-negotiable. We can, and we must, deliver a safe and healthy journey to school for every child worldwide.”

Dr. Margie Peden said: “The SDG strategies for child health and the global approach to road traffic injury prevention must be brought together, integrated effectively. The ‘Save LIVES’ package of interventions to address road safety in the SDGs, provides the solutions. What we urgently need is to mobilise the political support and the resources around the world to ensure that these solutions are in place, and particularly for children who are suffering an intolerable burden.”

Closing the session, Bright Oywaya gave her personal testimony as a survivor of a road traffic crash in Kenya. She said: “In much of the world road traffic is out of control. It represents part of development that should improve our lives but instead people are being injured and killed.

“In my country, the majority of school children walk to and from school. They have to cross many lanes and avoid speeding cars. Sadly, not all of them make it back home from school. Some are killed. Others are injured and acquire permanent disabilities like I have. This leads to loss of school time and denies them access to education that is a basic right. Which is a key priority of SDGs undermined. It is not just road traffic injury that is a threat to school going children, they are also forced to inhale fumes from unroadworthy vehicles thus exposing them to health complications including breathing related ailments.

“Such health burdens are entirely unacceptable particularly as we have the solutions readily available. My plea to the international community implementing the SDGs is to make safe and healthy journeys to school a priority for action right now.”

About the Festival
The Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development is the world´s most inspiring SDG event to celebrate, empower, and connect the global community driving Action for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Organised by the UN SDG Action Campaign with the support of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the German Federal Foreign Office, the Festival brings together the global community taking action to make the Sustainable Development Goals a reality. It will recognize and celebrate the innovators, conveners and breakthrough actors who are transforming lives and generating practical solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems.

Taking place in Bonn each year, the Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development provides a dynamic and interactive space to showcase the latest innovations, tools and approaches to SDG implementation and connect organizations and individuals from different sectors and regions to exchange, build partnerships, and make the impact of their solutions scale.

READ MORE ABOUT THE CHILD HEALTH INITIATIVE

“If you truly care about the people around you, please advocate for seat belt use everywhere, every time”.

The truth is, 17 percent of our population (USA) drives unbuckled and contributes to nearly HALF of our roadway fatalities. These non-seatbelt users include fathers/mothers, brothers/sisters, friends and grandparents. Help loved ones understand they should buckle up BECAUSE you love and care for them.

From 12-16th March 2018, we were in Nairobi, Kenya to co-deliver the first Alliance Advocates regional programme for the African region. The training brought together 20 NGO leaders from across Africa to be trained in advocacy and a particular focus on safe school zones across the region.

Having some of the highest rates of road crashes across the world, the African region sees a large proportion of the world’s road deaths. This training equipped NGO leaders to gain new skills in assessing schools zones using the new iRAP Safe Routes to School app, which helps road safety campaigners identify high-risk roads and advocate for improvement to a minimum 3* star road.

We joined the International Roads Assessment Programme (iRAP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety to train 20 NGO leaders from across Africa on advocacy. Countries included Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, Tanzania, Uganda, Algeria, and Kenya.

The participants were trained on a range of topics including the purpose of advocacy in road safety, understanding data gathering in the field, strategic planning for advocacy activities, talking with decision makers and getting your message across (road safety messaging). We were responsible for delivering the aforementioned sessions, designed in consultation with the Global Alliance using our interactive and brain-friendly methodology.

The regional focus enabled NGOs from a similar backgrounds, culture and road safety situation to align with a common focus; to improve school zones around the region. Pioneered by iRAP, this training offered practical insights into the Star Rating for Schools App, which guided participants through the process of assessing school zones and translating this data into a star rating. Similar to the rating of hotels, the high the star rating the safer the road for travel. African NGOs pledged to advocate for a minimum of 3-star roads to enable safe routes to school.

Advocates were guided through a practical session by going into the field and assessing a real school zone in central Nairobi. The Alliance Advocate training program is the flagship element of the Alliance Empowerment Program, an innovative capacity-building program, sponsored by FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX), which has so far seen 50 Advocates trained in data collection and analysis, evidence-based program design and management, media engagement, and advocacy.

READ MORE ABOUT THE ALLIANCE ADVOCATES PROGRAMME

On the Saturday night of their high school’s homecoming weekend in 2009, four teenagers were driving together in Coral Springs, Fla., when their Volkswagen jumped off the road and plunged into a canal. A 15-year-old in the car escaped. Three 16-year-olds — Anthony Almonte, Sean Maxey and Robert Nugent — drowned.

Since that shooting, the survivors have done something many people thought impossible. They have changed the debate over guns. They’ve started to shake this country out of its passive acceptance of avoidable death. They have demanded that adults start protecting children from violence.

No other affluent country subjects its teenagers to the risk of violence — or early death — that the United States does, and guns are one of the two big reasons. In 2016, 1,675 Americans between the ages of 13 and 19 were murdered with a gun. That made gun homicides the second leading cause of teenage death.

If the Stoneman Douglas shooting is finally going to stir Americans’ consciences about the unique violence of childhood here, let’s make sure that the discussion doesn’t end with guns. The goal, after all, should be saving lives.

As recently as 1990, driving in America was less dangerous than in most other high-income countries. Today, we have a higher death rate than all of our peers. And teenage driving is a huge part of the problem.

In some ways, guns and car crashes are similar public-health issues. With both, other countries have reduced deaths by following the evidence, and we can follow their lead. If anything, though, reducing vehicle deaths should be easier.

Guns have become a defining partisan and cultural clash — Republican versus Democrat, rural versus metropolitan, old versus young. As a result, reducing gun deaths depends on either persuading one political party to abandon a core position or defeating that party.

Vehicle safety is different. There is no lobbying behemoth like the N.R.A. insisting that teenagers get unrestricted licenses. The states that have adopted the safest teen-driving policies lean left, but only somewhat. Alabama, for example, passed new rules last year. Most states have gotten tougher in the last two decades, and deaths have fallen. But they haven’t fallen nearly enough, because the laws are not tough enough.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you should be able to support a campaign to reduce teen-driving deaths. For gun-control supporters like me, it’s part of a broader public-health effort. For N.R.A. supporters, it’s a way to save lives that avoids the Second Amendment.

What about teenagers who don’t like the idea of losing freedom? Many may not actually be upset. Today’s teenagers aren’t as enamored with driving as previous generations.

The solution, experts say, revolves around a system called “graduated drivers licenses,” in which teenagers slowly gain privileges as they gain experience. The reality is that most 16-year-olds aren’t ready to operate a lethal 2,000-pound machine that can punish a few seconds of inattention with death, for the teen or someone else on the road. The fatal-crash rate for 16- and 17-year olds is about six times higher than the rate for people in their 30s and 40s. Teen driving kills a lot of people.

The ideal system would create three license tiers: first, a permit allowing supervised driving, starting at age 16 or later (not 15, as most states allow); second, an intermediate license, which forbids nighttime driving and distractions, like phone calls or other teens in the car; and finally, after many hours of driving, the full license.

Within this framework, states can still make different choices. Rural states — where driving matters more to daily life — might choose to have somewhat lower age cutoffs. New Jersey, the most densely populated state, makes people wait until age 18 for a full license. New York and Delaware, the two states with the best laws, according to Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, have sharply cut deaths in the last decade.

No set of laws can eliminate driving deaths. But it’s clear that we can keep a lot more teenagers alive. The question is whether we care enough to do so. The students of Stoneman Douglas have held the country’s attention in recent weeks because of the raw moral power of their plea: Stop letting children die, and start acting like adults. Let’s get to it.

Adapted from New York Times Article
Opinion piece was written by @DanielLeonhardt