Extracts from Lords debate on UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 - Mar 19
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Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con):...Five years in Baghdad
and other missions with the US military elsewhere taught me a
lesson that road safety is not an add-on to personal and family
health; it is an integral component of human health, life and
safety. I welcome the adoption by the United Nations of the SDGs,
including target 3.6 regarding road traffic accidents. For some
years earlier, in my capacity as chairman of the AMAR international
charitable foundation, I partnered with...Request free trial
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
(Con):...Five years in Baghdad and other missions with the US
military elsewhere taught me a lesson that road safety is not an
add-on to personal and family health; it is an integral component
of human health, life and safety. I welcome the adoption by the
United Nations of the SDGs, including target 3.6 regarding road
traffic accidents. For some years earlier, in my capacity as
chairman of the AMAR international charitable foundation, I
partnered with Shellto tackle road safety issues
and the injuries and deaths of mothers and children in Maysan
province in Iraq. The province is in the south of the country and
has a huge oil field called al-Majnoon, meaning, “My God, what have
we got here?” It is one of the biggest oil reserves in the world,
and when they discovered it, that is what they named it. It has a
wide population of marsh people around it.
Shell entered into a partnership with the AMAR Foundation in order to have a look at these issues. I will say that the local population were very unbriefed indeed, and it was a pleasure to be able to work with them. We did a pilot in 2013 with 1,654 pupils. We expanded it to 72 schools and 136 teachers in the autumn of 2014. From May to December 2013 we extended it to April 2014, at no cost to Shell. The total value of the Shell project was $179,000. Within that, the core part was $42,000 plus $40,000 to produce the teaching materials for the local people and the training of trainers, with a field budget of $106,000. What did we do with that money, and why was it effective? At the heart of it lay the use of women. In that sense, that is a very successful way of working in any case. We trained volunteer women to assist on the Iraqi family road safety education project. During one quarter alone, the 24 women safety volunteers in al-Nashwa and the 40 in al-Dair made a total of, and I quote correctly, 9,315 education visits to families in the community, reaching an average of 8,482 beneficiaries educated every month. Quarterly refresher training was provided both in al-Nashwa to the WSVs on 8 June that year and in al-Dair. The 40 women safety volunteers and four supervisors were divided into two groups, owing to their large size. Part of my comments today will refer to modelling and looking at the ways in which achievements can happen. In this project, participant understanding of the training was evaluated through pre and post testing. Health staff from the AMAR clinics locally, also funded by Shell provided road safety education to a total of 3,831 patients during that quarter, an average of 1,271 people a month. During the quarter, a total of 226 road traffic accidents were recorded by health staff, representing a decrease from the 424 incidents and accidents reported in the previous quarter. Quarterly refresher training was provided; road safety education was delivered by the staff in the primary health centres; and the targeting of children in the schools was another outreach programme. For example, with children, a team worked hard to compose with the relevant local education department a teacher-training booklet, cards with photographs, messages and the children’s stories and songs, and this was piloted in a dozen or more schools. I raise these details because, as the noble Lord stated, the Department for International Development has spent a very large sum of money indeed over that same period of time—£9.8 million—and now there is another surge of funding to support more research programmes.
Shell has high sensitivity to the health of
populations local to the oil and gas fields where it works.
Indeed, it is the principal extractor in large parts of the
globe. Given the experience I have had with
Shell I very much welcome its approach to local
populations. It is, as far as I am aware, the only major oil and
gas institution with its own medical personnel in headquarters as
permanent staff. I cannot help but compare that with the use of
the funding that DfID has put into the global budget of the
Global Road Safety Facility, all of which appears to have gone on
research. So I seek to persuade the Minister to continue to think
globally—that is essential—but also perhaps to consider acting
locally. It is the people themselves who are suffering the road
incidents and if they have no knowledge they will not be able to
benefit from their Governments’ efforts... |