Why funding is vital in promoting road safety
What you need to know:
Urgent need. Governments may have provided the mandate for action, but it has not provided the resources to deliver it. We urgently need a massive increase in funding that is commensurate to the scale of the problem.
Earlier this year, I got involved in a minor road accident when my car hit a huge pothole on my way home on the Kira-Najjera road. The car I was driving veered off the road to a valley. Thank God, I was not hurt. However, my luck may not be other people’s whose vehicles have been overturned due to the sorry state our roads.
As government allocates billions of shillings to sectors like agriculture, health, education, and security, among others, we need to pay more attention to funding road infrastructures if we are to have good roads. Facts that deter road safety include traffic indiscipline by boda boda riders, which is partly responsible for increasing motor accidents in the city and high rate of causalities at Mulago Hospital. However, we cannot ignore other factors, including narrow and poorly constructed roads, potholes, unqualified drivers, and low emergency response at the scene of accidents, among others reasons.
Reports indicate that in the last decade, the recorded road crash fatalities in Uganda rose from 2,579 earlier to 3,503 in 2016, representing 25.9 per cent increment. This is a result of weak leadership in regard to road safety, declining priority of resource allocation and diminishing capacity of interventions mainly driven by low commitment to road safety matters, reduced interest of development partners in road safety and non-participation of key stakeholders.
To address such challenges, Members of Parliament of Uganda from the Parliamentary Forum for Road Safety (PAFROS) and I, attended the 25th meeting of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration at the beginning of the year. Among the topics discussed was the need for a legislative action plan to address road policy development, enactment, implementation and evaluation in Uganda.
The meeting focused on strengthening the capacity of government agencies, local governments and city authorities to develop and implement road safety programmes, and prioritising projects in low and middle-income countries.
In May, the first ever United Nations Fund for global road safety was launched. During the launch, inadequate road safety funding was one of the issues brought up in the forum. The forum is an important recognition that our collective efforts to tackle road safety must be scaled up.
Governments may have provided the mandate for action, but it has not provided the resources to deliver it. We urgently need a massive increase in funding that is commensurate to the scale of the problem. With the $10 million pledge, the FIA Foundation is stepping up and we are calling upon others to do the same!”
As a broad partnership mobilising expertise and resources across different sectors, including government authorities, civil society organisations, multilateral development banks, UN entities, other international organisations and academia, the Fund will support a coordinated and holistic approach to improving global road safety.
It is our hope that some of this funding will trickle down to Uganda given that one of the main issues affecting and stalling the implementation of many road safety interventions by the several government ministries, departments and agencies as well as civil society, is the lack of funding.
Speaking at the launch of Uganda’s Road Safety Legislative Action Plan, a project supported by the World Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility and being implemented by Safe Way Right Way, the Parliament of Uganda and the Ministry of Works and Transport, Mr Aggrey Henry Bagiire, said underfunding of road safety activities remains a very big challenge for the sector.
He added that improvement in road infrastructure in various parts of the country has not been accompanied by the requisite funding for road safety activities to ensure the improved roads do not claim lives.
Another critical development signals a commitment by the Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, who is also the patron of the Parliamentary Forum for Road Safety (PAFROS), recently pledged her support to work with MPs to deliver a legislation to support government agencies to implement policies that will ensure a systematic approach to road safety improvement in Uganda.
Without secure and stable funding, it is hard to sustain the policies required to achieve lasting reductions in casualty levels.
Ms Mwanje is the chief executive officer of Safeway Rightway.
