About us

The mission of the Global Road Safety Forum (GRSF) is to help raise awareness and bring people together to address the global road safety crisis in developing and transitioning countries. This includes advocacy, facilitating collaboration, especially with major institutional bodies, and organizing inclusive stakeholders’ forums regionally and globally.  GRSF blends a systems approach with a public health perspective in advancing global road safety through international, regional and national initiatives.

History

The Global Road Safety Forum is one of thirteen programs within the Task Force for Child Survival and Development (www.taskforce.org).  The road safety program originated in 2002 when the Task Force agreed to serve as the Secretariat of the Global Road Safety (GRS) Steering Committee, an international coalition of concerned individuals and organizations with a mission to raise political will and encourage swift action to stop the epidemic of road traffic injuries.

The GRS Steering Committee was instrumental in mobilizing and organizing support and political will for a UN General Assembly special session dedicated to the global road safety crisis on April 14, 2004.  It contributed to General Assembly Resolution 58/289, endorsing the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, published by the World Health Organization and the World Bank.  Additionally, the UN resolution called for a UN focal point on road safety, a report from the Secretary-General, and strengthening international commitment to the issue.

As Secretariat of the GRS Steering Committee, the Task Force also was charged with planning and organizing the 1st UN Stakeholders’ Forum on Global Road Safety held on April 15th, 2004 to engage governments, non-government organizations, civil society, corporations and other interested parties in developing road safety solutions.  Since 2004, with the continued support of the World Bank and the FIA Foundation, the Global Road Safety Forum (GRSF) was formed as a permanent program at the Task Force.   The GRSF mobilizes and supports road safety efforts at global and regional levels.  Currently, regional projects are underway in Latin America and the Caribbean and in South Asia.  On the international level, GRSF recently organized and executed the 2nd UN Stakeholders Forum on Global Road Safety at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on April 25, 2007.  GRSF continues to advance political will and facilitate road safety efforts around the world, partnering governments, civil society, and sector specific experts working collectively to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries by half by 2015.

Read more about our Current Initiatives ►

 

 

Our Approach

GRSF blends a systems approach with a public health perspective in advancing global road safety through international, regional and national initiatives.

A Systems Approach

The Systems Approach, as described in the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, serves as one aspect of our framework for identifying problems, formulating strategies, setting targets and monitoring performance.  In the systems view three main factors— the human, vehicles and equipment, and the environment interact over three time periods—pre-crash, crash, and post-crash to produce or prevent road traffic injuries.

These variables are combined to form a nine-celled matrix, named “the Haddon Matrix” after its creator William Haddon Jr., which identifies opportunities for intervention to reduce road collision injuries in each cell.

     

The Haddon Matrix		Factors
Phase		Human	Vehicles and Equipment	Environment
Pre-Crash	Crash Prevention	Information Attitudes Impairment Enforcement	Road worthiness Lighting Braking Handling Speed management	Road design Speed limits Pedestrian facilities
Crash	Injury prevention during the crash	Use of restraints Impairment	Occupant restraints Other safety devices	Crash protective roadside objects
Post-crash	Life-sustaining	First aid skill Access to medics	Ease of access Fire risk	Rescue facilities Congestion

The dynamic systems approach seeks to locate and remedy sources of hazardous design and behaviors that lead to road traffic crashes, and to lessen the severity and long-term impact of injuries. 

A Public Health Approach

Public health brings a systematic approach to problem solving that has traditionally been applied to problems of infectious diseases but also has great value for approaching non-infectious diseases and injury control.  There are three central characteristics of the public health approach: it is focused on prevention, based on science, and collaborative by nature.

Focused on Prevention      

While health care and medicine treat morbidity and mortality on the individual level, public health focuses on the aggregate population. In addressing the problem of road traffic injuries at the collective level, public health practitioners pay attention to all three phases of injury—prevention, acute care, and rehabilitation—but most of all stress the importance of prevention.  The Haddon matrix helps to identify the types of interventions that can contribute to the prevention of road traffic injuries.

Based on Science               

Our interventions are formed upon a foundation of scientific research and empirical observation.  A four-step model is used in the design of our road traffic injury prevention programs:

Step One: What is the problem? Who are the victims, what happened to them, where did it happen, when did it happen, and what are the consequences?

Step Two: What are the causes? What are the risk factors and what are the protective factors?

Step Three:  What works to prevent road traffic injury? What is the evidence to prove that the intervention is effective?

Step Four: How can it be done? How can an intervention be implemented and spread?  How can an effective demonstration be scaled up into a large-scale, well disseminated program?

The success of a science-based approach is dependent on our ability to conduct effective program evaluation.  Although road traffic injury data collection has been improving in recent years, injury surveillance systems are often inadequate or non-existent in regions where they are most needed.  National and regional capacity for injury data collection must be developed and they must focus on collecting the data that are most needed.  Sound data provide the basis for diagnosing and treating the problem, determining the most effective intervention and evaluating its impact.

Collaborative by Nature     

Public health is not a single profession but a field of work that draws upon many different disciplines, including medicine, epidemiology, biostatistics, nursing, engineering, law enforcement, public policy, program management, anthropology, and psychology.  Effective control of road traffic injuries requires collaboration among government departments (including transportation, law enforcement, health, finance, education, and urban planning), civil society, and the private sector.  Collaboration is difficult but essential.

Key Interventions

Our initiatives address critical categories of risk factors, including:

• Roadway design
• Speed reduction
• Reduction of impaired driving (e.g. from drinking, drugs, fatigue)
• Non-use of helmets
• Non-use of seat-belts

References

Peden, Margie, Richard Scurfield, David Sleet, Dinesh Mohan, Adan A. Hyder, Eva Jarawan, and Colin Mathers. World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention. World Health Organization. Geneva, 2004

Rosenberg, M, and Knox, L. "The Matrix Comes to Youth Violence Prevention A Strengths-Based, Ecologic, and Developmental Framework." American Journal of Preventive Medicine 29 (2005): 185-190.

 

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