UN Road Safety Fund pledging event “scratching the surface”
A pledging conference held by the UN Road Safety Fund today in the margins of this week’s UN High Level Meeting on Road Safety has raised $5.6 million in donor pledges.
The financial commitments were described by Nneka Henry, the head of the Fund, as “scratching the surface” of what is required to tackle the global road traffic injury crisis. She said that a further $7 million in pledges is “in the pipeline”.
Since launch in 2018 the Fund has raised $39 million, and claims this has directly catalysed a further $50 million in support for road safety action in low- and middle-income countries. The Fund has supported more than 50 projects in over 100 countries, including Rwanda’s motorcycle helmet standard, a child restraint law in Jordan and infrastructure safety coalitions in Tanzania and Senegal. But fundraising has been challenging, and only a handful of countries have provided financing for what had originally been envisaged as a transformative fund deploying hundreds of millions of dollars.
The European Commission has been one of the more engaged donors, alongside France which co-chaired the pledging meeting with Jamaica, a beneficiary country. Slovenia and Slovakia were two of the other donor governments present at the event in UN HQ in New York, alongside private sector supporters including Autoliv and Honda.
The Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros, participated and reminded Fund partners of the stakes: “This is not simply a health issue, it is an issue of equity, of development and of justice. The good news: road deaths are falling. The bad news: at this pace we will fall far short of our target and every day of delay costs lives.”
The UN Special Envoy for Road Safety, Jean Todt concluded the pledging event by urging greater effort, thanking the private sector donors for their support and reminding governments that their commitment could be through ambitious legislative and regulatory action, like requiring that all motorcycles are sold with UN approved helmets.
Images from UNTV