This week the United Nations convened for its second High Level Meeting on Global Road Safety. 

The World Health Organization’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was the keynote speaker. Annalena Baerbock, former German foreign minister, now president of the UN General Assembly, gave a moving speech, describing the “ripples of devastation” caused by the road death of a family member. Ministers and UN ambassadors took their turn at the podium. Earnest roundtables tour de tabled. Twenty-three dead children watched on, mute representatives of a many thousand others. 

These children, pupils of King David Junior School in Ndejje, outside Kampala, died last Thursday evening when their bus overturned on the way home from a school trip. Mechanical failure was blamed, driver error too. Government error? Not so much. The road they died on has seen multiple serious crashes, yet nothing remedial has been done. Cash-strapped schools cut corners on bus hire and maintenance. Ministers pay lip service to road safety but cut and run when the president tells them to. Like when he needs boda boda taxi riders to stop being distracted by driver training and motorcycle helmets so they can deliver menaces for his ‘re-elections’. 

The Ugandan government has responded to the coach disaster by banning school trips on buses until an investigation has been carried out. As if the president and ministers and civil servants and police and grieving parents and bloodied survivors and onlookers don’t already know the cause: political corruption, official incompetence, societal complacency, international neglect. This is the second major, multiple fatality, bus crash in Uganda just this month. It’s not like they weren’t warned. 

Almost a week after the crash, the UNICEF country representative ‘broke his silence’ (as a Ugandan newspaper put it), commending the government’s post-crash response and calling for more sustained road safety efforts. “Every child has the right to travel to school and return home safely. Road safety is a child rights issue linked to survival, education and a safe environment,” he said. Question is, if a safe journey to school is a child right, what is the UN child rights agency going to do about it, practically? 

Probably, not much. 

And what does a crushed bus on Chekwatit Hill, Uganda, and twenty-three broken children have to do with a soon-to-be forgotten UN session in the sultry dog days of a Manhattan July? 

Not enough. 

And therein lies the problem. Agency inaction and UN performative resolution-making are linked. They feed off each other and create a permissive environment for government indifference and inaction, a vicious cycle of nothing much. To help deliver change UN agencies need political mandates with budgets attached. Absent that, they make statements. 

Take this week’s session. The ‘high level meeting’ was mid. It was reasonably successful in its dynamic and in the media attention it secured, but it could have been so much more. In UN parlance, ‘high level’ means Head of State or Government, plus some foreign and finance ministers, a few Tech Lords, Bill Gates, and Shakira. High level meetings typically take place in September, during the high level segment of the UN General Assembly, when presidents and prime ministers come to make their set piece speeches. They don’t happen in July, when the air hangs humid and no one is around, unless the issue under discussion doesn’t much matter. The modalities document for this high level meeting spoke of deep concern and reaffirmed urgency. The urgency this week was reaffirmed at transport minister level, at best. 

The subject does matter very much to those who do attend. The UN, WHO and World Bank officials who believe in preventing road traffic injuries are good people and genuinely invested, as are the NGOs urging accountability, the desperate and enraged families of victims, and the more proactive government ministers and officials. They engage with the process in New York because they have to believe, because they want to wring every last drop of precious scarce juice from the cold stone, because their presence and buy-in is necessary to securing any international attention. And because these events have a beguiling self-importance and offer some degree of self-validation. 

But to the UN establishment, the hierarchy of agency DGs and ADGs, most of the Member States, it’s a box to tick, a play to act, and when the curtain falls they move smoothly on to the next thing. No emotion has been spent, except deep concern, no promises have been made, except reaffirmed urgency, and, for sure, no actual finance has been committed. Without financial commitments, governments can adopt resolutions with zero jeopardy and therefore with limited seriousness about follow through. Member States tell each other to ensure that road safety is adequately financed through domestic budgets and to encourage new financing mechanisms and greater catalytic funding for low-income countries. But they’ve been admonishing each other to do the same things for twenty years now. Nothing is binding. In this way, the UN road safety roadshow is best understood as ritual performance. 

This absence of financial commitment has been diminishing. The would-be-catalytic agencies run on vapour. The hardworking but cash-strapped UN Road Safety Fund held another replenishment conference ahead of the high level meeting, raising $5.6 million. Another $7 million is apparently in the pipeline. No offence intended to the UNRSF team, who are committed professionals, stoical in the face of adversity, but such sums are a rounding error for most serious philanthropic funds. Yet the limited funding that is invested generally shows good returns. The World Bank’s road safety facility has deployed around $80 million in grants over the last 20 years and claims to have influenced around $5 billion of safer road investment by the Bank. Big development bank loans are now being invested in stand-alone national road safety programmes, for which the UN process has played a cultivating role. 

But lack of finance/seriousness also means an absence of accountability. What are the various components of the UN system actually doing to deliver this second Decade of Action? Where are the staff, budgets and programmes in relevant established agencies? Where are the inter-governmental task teams? Where is the rich peer to peer dialogue engaging senior thought leaders and programmatic rain makers? These ingredients, which are an essential part of the fashionable development causes, have been largely missing. Bloomberg Philanthropies is the only member of the global health High Priesthood to seriously support road traffic injury prevention. It’s vital that it does and that it will invest more than $300 million over the next five years, a literal lifeline. Bloomberg’s ambition is to save a million lives by 2030. 

The UN should be, and often is, a force for good. It is an idea, an institution, worth defending from the nihilistic sharks that now circle. But on global road safety it has so far missed an opportunity to demonstrate its reach. One and a half Decades of Action have not moved the needle because road safety was never internalised by the global development establishment. It was tolerated, condescended to. But, with the exception of the above-mentioned few UN, WHO and World Bank officials working daily on road safety, and Mike Bloomberg and his team, no one in the charmed circle ever really gave a damn about a yearly toll of a million dead, mostly poor, people. 

And while the headline in New York was a 21% fall in the global fatality rate (accounting for population growth), which is something to applaud, that still leaves a million dead, mostly poor, people, the bodies piling up disproportionally in poorer countries and neighbourhoods. The real numbers, the ones that matter to the bereaved families today, are pretty much static and have been for more than two decades. The UN’s own assessment of progress towards the road safety target in the Sustainable Development Goals is that it has been ‘marginal’ and certainly inadequate to achieve a fifty per cent reduction in fatalities by 2030. Truth is, many middle- and most low-income countries are nowhere close. 

That is not to say that the UN process has been a failure. These events, these milestones on the roadshow, can galvanise governments that want to listen and do something, can attract new players to the table, and can be useful hooks from which to hang new ideas. They can offer networking, dealmaking, opportunities. They can provide a platform to ministers who want to announce real progress and a helpful profile to NGOs. But there’s no mass action flowing from this UN summitry because there’s insufficient organisation and funding to enact the paper decisions. 

Which is a shame, because the declaration approved by the high level meeting is excellent. It sets out with impressive clarity the policy and technical steps that need to be taken to bring the global traffic injury crisis under control. Its 48 recommendations are comprehensive. Perhaps too comprehensive. If this process is to again be truly worthwhile, it should consider using its UN convening power to target attention on a global campaign for one or two practical countermeasures that can quickly make a difference and, harnessing the lending potential of the development banks, challenge all countries to step up. 

Reducing speed was the rallying cry of the 2020 Stockholm ministerial, a call to arms for default 30km/h neighbourhoods. This solution encompasses urban and highway design, vehicle technologies like Intelligent Speed Assistance and active emergency braking, police enforcement and behaviour change. It protects walkers, cyclists, the old and the young. It stands up for child rights. It allows for a reimagining and redistribution of public space. It allies with climate action and public health. It can be implemented anywhere. 

Motorcycle safety, tackling the fastest rising cause of death, could be the other cause. This is vitally relevant in fast growing economies of the Global South. Helmet standards, bike quality, safety tech, road design, speed management and enforcement all play a role. There are already excellent two-wheeler partnerships delivering action in many regions and countries. Build on this. Sustained action in these areas will help to grow the political awareness and institutional capacity that can improve other aspects of road safety governance, like the inspection and enforcement regimes needed to fix Uganda’s fatal buses. 

Building the political coalition from the ground up, securing the support of local authorities, city mayors, roads directors and ministers who have power and budgets to enact change, encouraging new allies to get on board by demonstrating success. This is the approach that has been shown to work. Much of this is already happening through the Bloomberg Global Road Safety Initiative, the FIA Foundation and other convening partnerships. These efforts should be vibrantly diffuse, independent and responsive to local needs but must be better coordinated so resources aren’t duplicated, and all actors are united in delivering the same end goal. It also needs an imaginative approach to unlocking private sector resource that has so far been beyond the UN process. 

A high level meeting in July is not ideal, nor high level. But it is much better than being completely ignored. Many of us put serious campaigning effort into securing road safety as an issue on the UN development agenda. We need to make it count and, in a time of scarce resource and hostile political headwinds, find ways to keep forcing change. 

As the UN Special Envoy for Road Safety, Jean Todt, an arch critic of inaction, put it: “Business as usual is a business of death.” Just ask the families of the children of Chekwatit Hill.