Save Kids Lives: a call for road safety
#SaveKidsLives is the worldwide and official campaign for the Third United Nations Global Road Safety Week (4-10 May 2015). The campaign is calling for action to save children’s lives on the roads around the world. The campaign operates on the principles of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 and is managed by a broad coalition of members from the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration.
The campaign is calling for action to save children’s lives on the roads around the world. It does so by:
- highlighting the plight of children on the roads;
- generating worldwide action to better ensure the safety of children on the roads;
- calling for inclusion of safe and sustainable transport in the post-2015 development agenda.
The ‘post-2015’ Sustainable Development Goals will set the agenda for all work, worldwide on international development. They will replace the current ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs). Road Safety was not included in the MDGs and as a consequence action to reduce road traffic injuries and fatalities has not been a priority for policy making globally. We now face a situation where road traffic injury is the number one killer of young people aged 15-29 worldwide. Road traffic injuries have a health burden on the scale of malaria and tuberculosis, and the death rate is increasing. The crisis is most severe in developing countries, which account for 90% of the 1.3 million road traffic fatalities each year.
The United Nations has recognised that road traffic injury represents a major public health and development crisis. In the first draft of the new ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, Governments have included a target to halve road traffic fatalities. The Save Kids’ Lives campaign together with partners around the world is now calling on world leaders to ensure that this target is in the new Goals when they are launched in September 2015.
The danger is that if road safety is not included in the Sustainable Development Goals, there will not be adequate support to ensure that road safety is a priority worldwide, and particularly in developing countries. The consequences will be catastrophic – millions of lives are at stake, with young people especially vulnerable.
Save Kids Lives calls upon our leaders to make road safety a priority. It is unacceptable that so many children and young people are killed on the roads. Save Kids Lives wants road safety for everyone. The Child Declaration launched by Save Kids Lives, and delivered during UN Global Road Safety Week, is a call for the actions needed to save lives on the roads. These measures are already well known but too often they are not put in place. They must become a priority for decision makers in their agenda for future development.