Regions & Countries
The Global Road Safety Partnership is active in a growing number of regions and countries.
Criteria
Before a country can be adopted as a focus country, it must satisfy five basic criteria:
- It must face major road safety problems (measured in terms of number of fatalities per 100,000 vehicles, or similar indicators);
- The government must recognise that road safety is a problem and must be willing to do something about it (e.g. there must be the political will to tackle the problem of road safety);
- The government must have access to the financial resources required to enable it to address those road safety issues, which are the responsibility of government and can only be dealt with by the government (e.g. it must have sufficient domestic resources, or access to suitable donor support);
- There must be some form of road safety action plan in place to provide a framework within which the Global Road Safety Partnership can operate;
- Amongst our partners, there must be considerable interest to be active within the country. Indeed there ought to be Global Road Safety Partnership champion (s) who is (are) willing to provide leadership and facilitate the local Global Road Safety Partnership network; partners from various sectors must be willing to work together.
Scope
Once a country is identified as a possible Global Road Safety Partnership candidate, the Global Road Safety Partnership enters into a non-binding dialogue with country representatives and partner organisations to scope out potential interest. This staged approach is to ensure commitment for all parties. Only when all sides agree there is scope for the partnership approach will the Global Road Safety Partnership proceed.
Organisation
The next stage is to establish the local partnership and to begin the process of project identification. We assign a Global Road Safety Partnership advisor, who then becomes responsible for developing and animating a local partnership to tackle the local road safety problems. The partnership comprises local business interests, civil society organisations and government. It normally includes some of our main partners, but will also include other organisations that are not members of the Global Road Safety Partnership international Steering Committee.
It has proven to be the case that the country partners move to a more formal organisation. This has led to the establishment of non-governmental Global Road Safety Partnership organisations in most of the focus countries. The precise local format depends on national legislation and members' wishes. Examples are given in the country pages.
Such organisations are powerful evidence of the commitment of the members with the local partnership, and a step along the path to a sustainable operation in the country.
