World Bank Vice President Katherine Sierra signs up for the Decade of Action
The World Bank’s President, Robert Zoellick, and Vice President for Sustainable Development, Katherine Sierra, have both given strong endorsements for a Decade of Action for Road Safety.
In a letter to the Chairman of the Make Roads Safe campaign, Lord Robertson, Mr Zoellick says that “achieving the ambitious goals of the proposed Decade of Action – preventing 5 million deaths and 50 million serious injuries, in line with the 50 per cent reduction target – would clearly constitute a major public health achievement early in this century. We have strengthened our response to the proposed Decade of Action. We have bolstered the internal resources and capacity of the Global Road Safety Facility and engaged with other International Financial Institutions to harmonize our road infrastructure policies and practices”.
Katherine Sierra, the World Bank’s Vice President for Sustainable Development – including responsibility for the Bank’s huge transport portfolio – discussed her hopes for a successful outcome at the forthcoming Moscow Ministerial Conference on road safety. In an interview with the Make Roads Safe campaign, she said:
“What we see hopefully coming out of these major events is not just a one day meeting with a declaration. Instead we are looking to commit ourselves for at least a decade of action. This is going to be hard work, its going to need sustained effort, its going to need political leadership, and also the day to day hard work at country level. We’re committed to being part of that decade which should be starting next year and we are really hoping that other partners will come with us on that as well”.
Ms Sierra also discussed the World Bank’s desire to better prioritise road safety within its large road infrastructure programmes. “We are going to be working with our partners trying to leverage the very large programmes we have, the very large programmes other partners have – the regional development banks, other elements of the UN system, our bilateral partners – many of us are working on the ground on road transport. Instead of saying ‘lets have a road safety project there and a regular project here’, if we can combine those two things, if we can say with a little bit more funding, a lot smarter engineering with a lot smarter community involvement, we actually can do marvellous things. So it is about bringing together the knowledge, with the very strong pipeline that we have, thinking about doing this in an aggressive manner: going forward and building safety in from the beginning. That’s what we want to achieve here at the Bank”.
Before signing up to the ‘Call for a Decade of Action’ Kathy Sierra outlined the stark decision facing policymakers. “I think we have a choice and it is a cliché to say that we are at a crossroads when we are talking about roads, but I think we are at a crossroads. We have the opportunity to take the political momentum that’s been built to charter a new future, to really transform the way transportation systems are run, the way that humans interact with those systems, the way that we aggressively bring down traffic fatalities and accidents. We have a choice not to do that and if we don’t do that there are 75 million people whose lives will be lost over the next 50 years, with 750 million serious injuries. That is not something that I feel comfortable with”.