Total Foundation and Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) have signed a joint project to provide training, assistance and guidance to countries, with the goal of boosting road safety analytic and data usage capacities
GRSF is administered by the World Bank to help address the growing crisis of road traffic deaths and injuries in low and middle-income countries.
This project will directly assist African nations to improve their road safety data and information systems and expand the use of data for better targeting of road safety treatments, better monitoring, more rigorous evaluation and more effective advocacy. The initiative will improve the data provided to the Africa Road Safety Observatory (ARSO) and further facilitate country-to-country learning opportunities from the Observatory.
“With the African Road Safety Observatory, Total Foundation continues its commitment to advance road safety, particularly in Africa,” said Manoelle Lepoutre, senior vice-president, civil society engagement at Total.
“It is estimated that each US$1 of assistance provided by GRSF in the recent years has leveraged on average over US$40 of additional investment in safety. This partnership will help prevent the loss of many thousands of lives and debilitating injuries,” said Guangzhe Chen, global director for transport, World Bank.
“African countries are suffering from road crash deaths more than anywhere else globally, with the highest death rate in the world (26.6 deaths per 100,000 people each year). Responding to this crisis, GSRF and Total Foundation are working together in this project to deliver improved capacity for road safety data collection, storage, analysis and usage in Africa, to deliver evidence-based approaches to road safety policies and projects,” said Soames Job, head of GRSF and the World Bank’s global lead for road safety.
The global road safety crisis, which claims 1.35 million lives each year, can be solved by the commitment and collaboration of governments, authorities, the public and private sectors, through funding and implementing well managed, evidence-based interventions for road safety.
The partnership aligns with the Third Global High-Level Conference on Road Safety: “Achieving Global Goals 2030,” to be held from 19-20 February in Stockholm, Sweden.
