YOURS – Youth for Road Safety is joining the IRF World Congress happening in Istanbul, Turkiye from the 15th to the 18th of October 2024.
The Congress offers a unique platform for different organisations to engage with global leaders, policymakers, and industry experts in road safety and youth empowerment. It also serves as a key moment for road safety and transport partners to share their plans, pledges, campaigns for the upcoming 4th Ministerial Conference on Road Safety on February 2025 in Marrackesh, Morocco.
YOURS is participating as a co-organiser to the IRF Young Professionals Summit session, representatives at a high-level roundtable session, and as a nominee for the Inclusion and Diversity Award to the IRF Award Ceremony.
As co-organisers to the Young Professionals Summit, YOURS will engage young professionals in road safety discussions that focus recognising the role of youth in addressing the road safety crisis.
Youth remain to be the most affected age group impacted by road traffic injuries yet are often uninvolved in decisions that most affect them.
Through this Summit, YOURS will reiterate the role of youth in road safety, as stated in the Global Plan for Road Safety 2021-2030. Through its advocacy tools and resources, YOURS will lead the conversation on why its important and necessary for decision-makers and other leaders to invest in youth and be accountable in their commitments for road safety and in meaningful youth engagement.
The roundtable session will aid these discussions by focusing the conversation on the linkages between health, active mobility, and climate action in building safe and sustainable mobility systems while emphasising the importance of youth involvement.
While YOURS has key roles in building the messages of the Conference and in shedding light on youth efforts in road safety, the organisation is also recognised as a nominee for the Inclusion and Diversity for its Belize Youth Empowerment Programme.
This category honours outstanding achievement in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the transportation sector. It celebrates organisations, projects, and/or initiatives that have demonstrated exemplary leadership, innovation, and commitment to fostering inclusive practices and embracing diversity in all its forms.
The Belize Youth Empowerment Programme, launched in 2014, was created to address the road safety crisis in Belize. With investment from the Carribean Development Bank to improve infrastructure in the country, YOURS worked with young leaders to tackle the statistics.
Through the Programme, YOURS trained 35 young leaders on road safety through its award-winning capacity development methodology. These leaders went on to train a futher 2000+ youth in road safety by the end of 2015.
Continued efforts by these youth leaders resulted in them reaching 3,000 more of their peers through workshops in schools, festivals, through music and media outreach. They even founded the Belizean Youth for Road Safety (BYRS) to keep spreading the message and ensure that no one was left behind.
The IRF World Congress will gather the road and mobility sectors as enablers of growth and development.
With the theme, “Connecting to Empower Mobility: Roads as Enablers of a Sustainable Future for All”, the congress will serve as a platform explore innovations in road safety and more.
More updates will follow after the event – in the mean time, you can read more about the Congress in the link below;