This year, my first as Chairman, has seen the FIA Foundation working with partners across the world to prepare for the first Global Ministerial Conference on road safety. I have been delighted to see a strong participation by both ministers and senior institutional officials in our Rome launch for the new Make Roads Safe report ‘A Decade of Action for Road Safety’, in our ‘Make Roads Safe Africa’ conference held in Dar es Salaam, and in other national and regional events from London to Kuala Lumpur, from Washington DC to Phnom Penh. There is a real sense that momentum is growing for action on road traffic injuries.
FIA Foundation Chairman Carlos Macaya
I was particularly proud to host a Make Roads Safe event in Costa Rica in January, at which President Oscar Arias Sanchez spoke. This event also saw the launch with Michael Schumacher of a new international road safety manual on seat belts and child restraints, part of a series of good practice manuals coordinated by the FIA Foundation in partnership with the World Health Organization, the Global Road Safety Partnership and the World Bank.
There was a pleasing symmetry to this event, because one of the first road safety initiatives taken by the newly established FIA Foundation was to develop a seat belt toolkit, to disseminate good practice internationally. It was piloted during the successful seat belt campaign that was run in Costa Rica, with FIA Foundation support, six years ago. This toolkit became the prototype for the subsequent series of good practice manuals which are now being used by a wide range of governments, city authorities and road safety practitioners across the world.
This is just one example of how the FIA Foundation has innovated and led. As we prepare for what we hope will be a Decade of Action for road safety, the FIA Foundation will continue to take an innovative and ambitious approach to improving road safety. Similarly in the environmental sphere, with our high-level collaboration on vehicle fuel economy policy, and in our support for cutting edge motor sport safety research, the FIA Foundation is working to expand the parameters of the possible.
Yet none of this work could be achieved without the alliances and partnerships that the FIA Foundation is proudly a part of and along with my fellow Trustees I would like to thank everyone who has worked with us to help us deliver our charitable objectives in 2009.
Carlos Macaya
Chairman
FIA Foundation