Energy giant, Total through her Foundation (Total Foundation) has announced joining World Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) as its newest donor partner with a mission to help address the growing crisis of road traffic deaths and injuries in developing African countries.
Total Foundation and GRSF signed a joint project to provide training, assistance and guidance to countries, with the goal of boosting their road safety analytic and data usage capacities.
Total in a statement said the project would 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. Adding that the initiative would also improve the data provided to the Africa Road Safety Observatory (ARSO), and further facilitate country-to-country learning opportunities from the Observatory.
The Senior Vice President, Civil Society Engagement at Total, Manoelle Lepoutre said, “With the African Road Safety Observatory, Total Foundation continues its commitment to advance road safety, particularly in Africa. Total is a major player on the continent, widely present on its roads, and has strongly improved the road safety performance of its transportation operations.
“As such, we have decided to share our expertise. We also want to help make the collection and analysis of road accident-related data more professional, to be able to implement the appropriate measures and fight this scourge more effectively,” he said.
Continuing Lepoutre said, “We are convinced that it is through partnerships like this one, which involves governments, institutions, experts and the private sector that we can significantly reduce the number of road traffic deaths.”
Commenting, the Global Director for Transport, World Bank, Guangzhe Chen said, “The strong support of Total Foundation as a new donor to GRSF will make a real difference to road safety in Africa. It is estimated that each $1 of assistance provided by GRSF in recent years has leveraged on average over $40 of additional investment in safety. This partnership will help prevent the loss of many thousands of lives and debilitating injuries.”
“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.
This program of funding strengthens the ongoing partnership between Total Foundation and GRSF.
The organizations have worked together on road safety in Africa previously, including jointly supporting work on high crash risk corridors in Africa.
It noted that the global road safety crisis, which claims 1.35 million lives each year, can only be solved by the commitment and collaboration of governments, authorities, the public and private sectors, though funding and implementing well managed, evidence-based interventions for road safety.
Peace Obi
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