Amend and Road Safety Fund Host Policy & Donor Roundtable in Tanzania.

This week Amend and the Road Safety Fund hosted a Policy and Donor Roundtable in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to discuss ways to advance the road safety agenda in the country and wider region. The Roundtable was opened by British High Commissioner to Tanzania, Dianna Melrose who delivered the keynote speech. Kevin Watkins, Executive Director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Chaired the Forum. It was the first time that such a wide range of major donors in Tanzania had gathered to discuss road safety. Among the organizations attending the Forum were the UK Department for International Development (DFID), USAID, the European Union Delegation to Tanzania, the World Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. As High Commissioner Melrose noted in her remarks, “Just last week we saw an appalling bus crash in Kenya in which 41 people lost their lives. That accident made headlines around the world. But the WHO estimates that the same number of people is being killed on the roads here in Tanzania every two days.”It is our hope that the Roundtable served to educate and inform donors and policy makers about the impact that road traffic injuries are having across Africa and what can be done to prevent those injuries.