Child Health Initiative + 10
It is ten years since the launch of the Child Health Initiative, a partnership advocating for safe and healthy mobility for children.
Led and hosted by the FIA Foundation, the Child Health Initiative brought together a mix of child development, transportation, health and environmental organisations to collaborate on policy and programmes to advance child and youth safety on the roads. Partners including UNICEF, Save the Children, UNEP, the World Resources Institute, the World Health Organization and the Overseas Development Institute, brought new collective energy to addressing neglected issues of child road traffic injury, the health cost of air pollution on young lungs, and the absence of children’s perspectives from policy design in urban planning and transportation.
At an event in June 2016, hosted by Kevin Watkins, CEO of the Overseas Development Institute in London, the Child Health Initiative was launched by Zoleka Mandela, granddaughter of Nelson Mandela and a mother bereaved by a road traffic crash, who was a committed and vocal advocate for traffic safety and became the initiative’s global ambassador; and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, then chairman of the FIA Foundation.
Significant milestones claimed by the Child Health Initiative included securing the inclusion of language on safe journeys to school in the New Urban Agenda and co-publishing a report on child poverty and road traffic injury with UNICEF in 2016; bringing together climate, air quality, health and safety advocates at a 2017 event with London’s mayor Sadiq Khan; launching a campaign for an adolescent health summit, and publishing innovative political economy research with the Overseas Development Institute and World Resources Institute in 2018; seeing key programmatic partner AMEND win the inaugural WRI Ross Cities Prize in 2019; launching a 2030 Manifesto for children and adolescents at the Stockholm Ministerial Conference on Global Road Safety in 2020; organising a high level event for adolescent health during the UN General Assembly, and a first ever (virtual) Global Summit for Adolescent Health in 2023.
The Child Health Initiative has also helped to foster partnerships between philanthropies, resulting in collaborative publication of the Global Designing Cities Initiative’s child friendly design manual by the FIA Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Fondation Botnar and the Bernard van Leer Foundation. Support for safe routes to school programmes resulted in changes in legislation or regulations in several countries. Close cooperation with development banks and governments, for example through the Safe Schools Africa initiative, has helped to unlock financial and technical support and to change implementation practice. Details of these activities and achievements can be found in the Child Health Initiative’s most recent progress review.
Saul Billingsley, founder of The Powerless, led the design and launch of the Child Health Initiative. “It is great to see how much has been achieved over the past decade, both in policy development and the incubation of child injury prevention programmes which are now scaling and delivering mass action solutions. The Child Health Initiative is having a measurable impact and influence, particularly in safe routes to school, and has helped to generate and sustain an international ecosystem of NGOs working on child survival and wellbeing in road traffic.”
Congratulations to all involved in the first ten years of the Child Health Initiative, and power to the team continuing and consolidating this vital work for children and adolescents across the world.