The Eastern Partnership Declaration on Road Safety^[1], endorsed in April 2018 in Ljubljana, sets the target of reducing the number of fatal and serious road traffic injuries by 50% from 2020 to 2030. To reach these goals, the Eastern Partnership Transport Ministerial Meeting on 6 June 2019 in Luxemburg endorsed a joint declaration^[2], announcing that the countries will work together towards the establishment of a Regional Eastern Partnership Road Safety Observatory (EaP RSO). The countries are also party to the UN Resolution on Improving Global Road Safety (UN RES/74/299) which encourages member states to leverage the opportunities of “regional road safety observatories, to harmonize and make road safety data available and comparable.”

The Eastern Partnership Road Safety Observatory (EaP RSO), is being supported by the European Union financed under the Neighborhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI-Global Europe): EU Grant Contract #NDICI-GEO-NEAR/2023 / 451-203 “Supporting the Eastern Partnership Regional Road Safety Observatory” (EaP RSO).   The EaP RSO is hosted by Georgia, as selected competitively among EaP bidder countries by the European Commission and confirmed to the Government of Georgia in May 2021. The Secretariat of the new EaP RSO is established in Tbilisi, Georgia in the ISET Policy Institute, and is being led the ISET Policy Institute and by EASST, the Eastern Alliance for Safe & Sustainable Transport.

EaP RSO is a joint initiative of the EU and of the countries in the Eastern European Neighborhood who are members of the Eastern Partnership Transport Panel, united with the common goal of advancing quickly and efficiently towards the reduction of road traffic fatal and non-fatal injuries. The Technical Secretariat of the EaP RSO has now been established in Georgia housed within ISET Policy Institute and working with EASST. The next steps are the development and implementation of a program of work with the member countries. EaP RSO Partner countries involved in the EaP RSO are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

The EaP RSO will be instrumental in achieving this goal by fostering the sharing of good practices and interchanging data to help create a solid body of evidence-based practice. It will work to develop capacity in data collection, data reliability, and improvements in the analysis and practical application of data essential for road safety policy development. The Observatory will house some country-level data, but more importantly, it will act as a catalytic force to develop or strengthen national road safety data collection, management, and analysis, including data on key road risks not derived from road crashes (such as seat belt wearing rates or drink driving).

To date EaP partner countries have agreed: to work jointly under the framework of the EaP RSO; upon a governance structure that includes different levels of interaction between countries (political, technical, etc.) including working groups and National Data Coordinators (NDCs); to have a four-year time frame with data sharing; on joint interventions and capacity building activities; on EaP RSO outputs such as a website and regular reports; and to have annual data submission by member countries. Supported by the World Bank, work has been done to develop the branding and draft design for an EaP RSO website, assess the current state of road safety data in EaP member countries and opportunities for improvement, and identify civil society organisations (CSOs) working in the region with a direct interest in road safety.

Link to original source: https://eaprso.org/