The Delft Road Safety course (DRSC) is a cooperation between Delft University of Technology, SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research, Delft Post Graduate Education and Road Safety for All. The objective of DRSC is capacity building for road safety professionals in low and middle income countries by transferring knowledge on effective road safety strategies, action plans and projects.
The annual Road Safety Course in Delft is one of the core activities, besides on line learning, organizing similar courses abroad and supporting training and research programmes in LMIC’s. FIA Foundation is supporting DRSC.
It is my pleasure to announce the new two-week course on road safety in low and middle income countries. As in 2015 the course is offered by Delft Road Safety Courses (DRSC) in association with FIA Foundation. Both organizations can build on several successful years of running this and similar training programmes.
– Fred Wegmans
In many low and middle income countries (LMIC’s), the number of road traffic fatalities and serious injuries are high with mortality rates up to ten times higher than the best performing countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that every year 1.25 million people are killed in road crashes and it is estimated that annually as many as 50 million people are injured in road crashes . According to the WHO, almost 90% of traffic casualties occur in low and middle income countries. Not only is this a tragedy for all concerned, also from an economic point of view this leads to a tremendous loss of (human) capital.
This development is not imperative, however. It is demonstrated that even in countries with a strong economic growth and a rapid increase of motorization, a reduction of fatalities and injuries can be reached through implementing effective road safety strategies. The Netherlands is one of these examples.
Since the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety and the recent acceptance of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in which road safety is included, the political priorities have been clearly set. Now it will come down to design the cost-effective national strategies and implement action plans. The Road Safety Course in Delft aims to present to you the vast knowledge and expertise underpinning strategies and action plans. Our course leader professor Fred Wegman and the lecturers are recruited from the world’s leading experts on road safety. They will provide you with the latest state of art.
Our Executive Director Floor Lieshout delivered a presentation at the course on advocacy and our work.
As part of the session on Awareness Raising and Advocacy, a Question & Answer sesson was also conducted with the participants asking the panelists questions about the topic, Joop Goos also joined the session.