Child Health Initiative: Safe and healthy journeys to school to reduce emissions and exposure to air pollution, enable active transport, and ensure safe roads

Strong partnerships and collaboration with global partners enabled CHI to flourish. FIA Foundation has been at the forefront of funding such innovative, life-saving solutions for years and built strong links with partners worldwide. Bringing interventions together under the umbrella of CHI accelerates progress, encourages peer to peer learning, access to resources and opportunity to build capacity partner-wide. It prevents duplication of efforts, yet strengthens individual skillsets and galvanises innovations, increasing overall impact and actions towards a common goal – safe and healthy journeys to school. Unfortunately, a major challenge is that road safety remains a low political priority in cities, despite the growing number of people killed in traffic crashes. Research by the Overseas Development Institute, Securing Safe Roads: the Politics of Change, includes in-depth analysis of three cities – Nairobi, Mumbai and Bogotá – finding that lower-income segments of society bear the brunt of traffic-related injuries and deaths, and both politicians and the public tend to blame individual road users for crashes, rather than policy-makers or planners. Politicians often favor large-scale, car-oriented projects that generate short-term political rewards moving traffic faster, rather than safer. This is compounded by public attitudes that responsibility for road crashes lies solely with the individual, rather than city and national governance infrastructure and legislation failures. There are, however, steps being taken by all three cities to introduce road safety plans. Nairobi, for example, is developing new roads with cycling and walking routes. Cities are striving to move away from victim blaming – the first step in recognizing that all crashes are preventable, not unavoidable random accidents. A common constraint is the lack of reliable and comparable data. Reliable and accurate data are needed to raise awareness about the magnitude of road traffic injuries, and to convince policy makers of the need for action. Robust data are critical in correctly identifying problems, target populations, and prioritising risk factors. In addition, accurate data is also needed to understand air pollution, and target interventions. Remote sensing technology, as used by the TRUE initiative, provides a highly accurate way to understand the individual emissions from thousands of vehicles. CHI’s implementing partners have come across various issues specific to implementation, often including a lack of political will to implement changes and/or lack of resources, lack of general awareness of this epidemic on wheels, duplication of efforts by NGOs working in the field, and lack of cooperation between various stakeholders. One way to overcome these challenges is to organize a UN Summit on Adolescent Health. This Summit is integral to recognizing the power of cross-cutting partnerships and the interlinkages between the SDGs that extend far beyond road safety, bringing the wider adolescent health agenda into the political limelight. Road safety is not the only neglected adolescent health disease – mental health, sexual and reproductive health, and other areas also suffer from a lack of political will and funding. Young people are our future, and it is vital that there is sufficient political attention and resources focused on the issues they face.