APRSO Annual Meeting 2021 concludes with election of chair and steering committee members and renewed commitment to improve road safety data management

The Asia-Pacific Road Safety Observatory’s annual meeting for 2021 was held on 9 to 11 November and featured two days of presentations on road safety data management from the viewpoints of member countries and founding development organizations, and a final day devoted to establishing APRSO’s new governance structure.

One of the annual meeting’s goals was to shift the management and decision making of the APRSO fully over to country representatives, with founding organizations like ADB taking a supporting role. This was accomplished with the election by members of the first ever country Chair of the APRSO – Australia – and the establishment of a member-elected steering committee of five: Australia, Bangladesh, Nepal, New Zealand and the Philippines.

Presentations and the discussions they prompted showed that there are still many gaps to a regional understanding of road safety – presenters noted that while many countries have good quality data in some aspects – speeding, black spots – many lack data in critical areas. In the aspect of implementation this is also true, many APRSO member countries have an identified lead agency for road safety, but only three member countries have a fully funded road safety strategy, all others have only a partially funded strategy or none at all.

APRSO enters 2022 with the expectation that it will be an important year for road safety data as the WHO will be ramping up their efforts on data gathering as they ready for the release of the Global Status Report on Road Safety in 2023. The APRSO has stated its readiness – and eagerness – to be part of the data collection and verification process.

Speakers expressed hope that with COVID-related travel and mobility restrictions easing, face to face meetings and data gathering could resume – noting that it is much easier to do such activities on the ground rather than virtually.

Despite the large challenges still ahead, the meeting ended on a hopeful note with the recoganition of the exponential growth of the road safety community was noted as of five years ago, there were only 50 countries worldwide that were doing clustered activities on road safety data and analysis, but through the establishment and actions of the global road safety observatories – in Europe, Ibero-America, Africa and Asia-Pacific – that number of countries has more than doubled to 121. Though separate, the observatories have a shared conviction that a unified group of countries will help road safety goals be met faster, road safety solutions tested more completely, and answers to road safety challenges will more easily spread through regions by the membership.

Presentations and recordings of the Annual Meeting can be found on the event site.