A group of Serbian students recently shared their campaign video with us on the trend of young using social media behind the wheel. In their efforts to raise awareness, the girls have created a campaign video focusing on “selfies” behind the wheel. Check it out here.

On the afternoon of 5th April 2007, my 16-year-old cousin Shivam was doing what he did almost every day at that time, walking back from school. Though this particular day was to be his last. He was struck by a vehicle while crossing the road and left seriously injured. He managed to drag himself to the side of the road and for the next 30 minutes begged passers-by to help him. While hundreds stopped, not one person came forward to assist him or even call for help. He died of treatable injuries.

The circumstances surrounding his death became unacceptable to me. I learnt soon after that his death was not an isolated incident and that thousands of road crash victims in India die every year of treatable injuries, by the side of the road. They never get any assistance. Bystanders, who would otherwise become first responders to victims of natural disasters and even terror attacks, remain mute spectators to victims of road crashes.

They fear police harassment, detention at hospitals and prolonged court proceedings, as confirmed later in a national study conducted by an organisation I established to tackle the issue. SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF) was my response to the disaster that road crashes had become in India, having affected millions of families including mine.

SLF began by training police to become medical first responders to road crash victims. Their existing personnel and infrastructure helped rush injured persons to hospitals with first-aid provided by police personnel en route. SLF then focused on training community volunteers, who would typically be closer to crash spots than police vehicles.

In 2009 we built a system to connect volunteers, police officers and hospitals through a mobile phone-based technology. This model to train, connect and mobilise police personnel and citizen volunteers won the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2010 and was rapidly adopted by the Indian government. To date, 150,000 injured persons have been rushed to various hospitals under this model with a survival rate of over 98%.

In parallel, SLF also secured a judgment from the Supreme Court of India, which ordered the Indian Government to take appropriate and immediate action to protect Good Samaritans who help injured persons. The idea is to ensure that any citizen can become a rescuer with a supportive institutional environment.

Working closely with police, hospitals and road crash victims gave us a unique exposure to the “actual” causes of road crashes in India. For instance, a tendency to blame road crashes on the the Indian way of driving meant that most interventions led to spreading “awareness” among drivers. The actual problem, meanwhile, lay in the institutional process (or lack of it) that allowed untrained drivers to get on the streets without any credible testing. The entire filtration process was compromised.

Another actual cause of crashes – faulty road design and engineering – was rarely looked at as an issue. I discovered that the law governing road safety in India was so deeply fractured that not only did it not address the causes of road crashes but contained statutes that would in fact lead to horrific crashes. No wonder in the past decade more than 1.2 million people have been killed in road crashes in India and over five million left seriously injured or permanently disabled.

I soon established the Policy Advocacy practice at SLF and began to demand complete institutional change. SLF built a six-pronged strategy to campaign for this change. The elements of this strategy ranged from building public pressure around the issue to forming alliances with like-minded organisations and invoking the Supreme Court of India to bring seek interim relief and attention to the issues. During this period we faced tremendous difficulties – from official apathy and lack of funding to death threats issued to me by mafia involved in the transportation business who would get directly “affected” by our work.

We pushed through, got enormous support from public and media, and in June 2014, the Government of India agreed to our demand to repeal the old road safety laws and replace them with a comprehensive legislation. The key element of this legislation would be the establishment of an independent, empowered lead agency, which would finally take ownership for road safety in India and create sustainable interventions in each of the root causes responsible for the high number of road crashes in India.

SLF was invited to contribute to the drafting of the bill and the draft legislation was finalised for introduction in parliament in December 2014. The bill is expected to be passed by the Indian parliament shortly. The next challenge would be to ensure that it is enforced across India and institutional mechanisms established at local levels to achieve that.

Today SLF’s model is clear – we will fight for long-term institutional change and build on-ground proofs of concept. Just like our on-ground model of emergency care has been adopted for replication, our other interventions too will be designed such that institutional replication becomes possible.

The vision of SLF is not to become the largest NGO in India. It is to reach a stage where it will not be required to exist, having achieved its mission. The fight to get there through positive, deep and lasting impact continues.

Piyush Tewari is CEO and founder of the SaveLIFE Foundation. He was made a Rolex Awards for Enterprise Young Laureate in 2010 for his work in the field of science and health.

A group of Serbian students recently shared their campaign video with us on the trend of young using social media behind the wheel. In their efforts to raise awareness, the girls have created a campaign video focusing on “selfies” behind the wheel. Check it out here.

There are several examples around the world that shows that when recording or photographing passengers in the vehicle, driver’s attention is not focused on the traffic situation, and that this led to the emergence of a serioues traffic crash. One second of inattention can cause the occupants of the vehicle lose their lives or sustain life long injuries in traffic crashes

One of the author videos, Sanja Despotovic, says she and her colleagues came to form this idea because they realized that this situation while driving more frequent and that greatly affect the occurrence of accidents among young people 16-30 years, who are the most common users of social networks.

The campaign “Don’t take a picture, take a drive!” points to the danger of using mobile phones while driving and the consequences that this behavior can cause.

Communications Officer at YOURS, Mr Manpreet Darroch said, “This campaign is one of those fantastic organic ideas that come from young people who see a problem in real life and do something about it. In this case, the #Selfie behind the wheel can be a serious distraction! I applaud the girls in Serbia for their innovative campaign and illustrating once again how youth care about road safety and the welfare of their peers”

In late 2012, YOURS worked with an exceptional group of young Kenyan leaders to train them as facilitators. Many of them still talk of the day that road safety spark was ignited in them and passion for the cause born. One of those facilitators, a young leader working for the Kenya Red Cross, was inspired by the #SaveKidsLives campaign and wrote this poem.

Present for my Little Ones
By Joel Njorogejoe

Teenage has beaten me,
Off and my young age starts to melt
Like snow that curses sun rise
But with countless quotes of my tender years
When I was befallen by inability
I needed protection from my seniors
That today stamps my well being

My eyes floods with tears
My heart mourns and tears
When I hear my ‘little ones’ vanishing
Through the harming enemy of carelessness
Most say they are just accidents,
But not;
For road traffic crashes can be prevented
Our young ones can still live happily
With good health from our caution

Count these losses;
Of lost hopes for nations and world
Youngsters leaving us in pain
Why go this early in life?
We ask countless but rhetoric
Future mentors and gloom of the nation
Gone for good and never to come back
Not even to read this message of hope

We have lost many and are tired
And now beg we take a ponder
Embracing the safety strives
Actions to protect our little ones
From the merciless mandibles of
Traffic road crashes, as I give today;
The present for my little ones
By joining all positive ventures
Fight negligence and wave your pledge
Save the little kids.

Poem by; Joel Njoroge (Daddy Poet)
Twitter: @_njorogejoe

Our friends at the FIA Foundation explain the latest processes of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda and what it means for road safety. Read how you can get involved with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) and the latest information on the process as it reaches its climax this year.

The advocacy effort calling for road safety to be included in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is showing signs of progress, but the critical work lies ahead with UN negotiations building momentum over the coming months.

At the UN, the process to negotiate the SDGs has entered its final stages. A stocktaking session was completed in January, with work on the text of the opening declaration for the SDGs due to start on 17 February. Negotiations on the substance of the goals and targets will then commence in March with the concluding sessions over the summer.

So we are at the start of the final and most important phase, the culmination of the long-running process to establish the global development agenda for the next 15 years. For the inclusion of road safety in the SDGs, the outlook is positive but the stakes are high. Progress had been made over 2014, and inclusion of road safety in the two most important UN reports on the SDGs means that the issue has a place at the negotiating table.

The UN Secretary General’s ‘Synthesis Report’ on the SDGs together with the draft SDGs from the UN’s Post-2015 Open Working Group (OWG) will frame the upcoming negotiations between Governments at the UN.

In his Synthesis Report, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for the post-2015 agenda to address ‘road accidents’ alongside other major health concerns such as AIDS and tuberculosis, non-communicable diseases and water, sanitation and hygiene. This followed the OWG draft goals which specifies the target (3.6) within a Post-2015 Health Goal to halve global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents. This is reinforced in the Cities Goal where target 11.2 calls for safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems.

The fact that road safety was included in both of these influential reports, means that the issue will be given due consideration during this final and critical negotiating phase. The task ahead is to ensure that during the rounds of negotiations Governments support the target to halve road fatalities in a Post-2015 Health SDG.

The advocacy effort through 2014 taken forward by a broad and effective coalition succeeded in rallying support from Governments at the UN. The FIA Foundation, together with the FIA and its member clubs, along with partners from across sectors including the NCD Alliance and the Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLocAT) worked hard to advocate for the road safety SDG target throughout last year. The coalition certainly had an impact as reflected in the proposals from Ban Ki-moon and the OWG. Indeed, the message has also started to get through to mainstream development organisations with major influence at the UN.

In January, the group of ‘Child Focused Agencies’ convened by UNICEF and including Save the Children, World Vision, and the ChildFund Alliance were briefed on the need to include a focus on child road injury in their post-2015 advocacy. The new global partnership between UNICEF and the FIA Foundation will play a key role in taking the advocacy forward with this group. UNICEF has highlighted road safety as one of the Post-2015 ‘targets of crucial importance to children’.

This work must now be taken forward over the next few months, and it is the ‘#SaveKidsLives’ campaign that provides the platform for a big advocacy push. #SaveKidsLives focuses attention on why we need the road safety target. It is an agenda to protect the most vulnerable, our children who are on the front line of the global epidemic of road traffic injuries. All too often, they are the innocent victims of an unsafe system, one which neglects the human dimension of development.