INTERACT WITH THE NEW TOOLKIT

This Advocacy and Campaigns Toolkit is your key to becoming a delegate to the 3rd World Youth Assembly for Road Safety happening in Marrakesh, Morocco in 2025. Use this resource to meet some of the requirements needed for the WYA applications!

Dive in and try not to skip the pages - every bit of information can help you get to Morocco!

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YOURS - Youth for Road Safety developed this tool to support members of the Global Youth Coalition for Road Safety and other Changemakers worldwide to advocate for safer and more sustainable mobility systems towards the 4th Ministerial Conference on Road Safety that will take place in Marrakesh in early 2025.

In light of the recent Global Status Report on Road Safety, young people are most impacted by a man-made pandemic: road traffic crashes. Your passion for change and improving your community’s local road safety conditions will continue to be impactful to policy changes that will save the lives of young people and all road users. As a young leader, you are the present and the future, and your demands for change and investment in sustainable mobility, health and well-being, climate action, and the sustainable development agenda are the solutions that world leaders seek. The world’s journey to a sustainable and inclusive future starts with you and young people like you.

It is normal to feel frustrated and run out of patience but you should learn to adapt and be flexible. The journey matters as much as the end goal. Remember, it is always about the end goal; contributing to saving lives and having more sustainable mobility systems.

In this toolkit, you will find joy information from the Global Status Report on Road Safety and the Global Plan for the 2nd Decade of Action for Road Safety that will help you understand how road safety is central to achieving the Sustainable Development Agenda. You will learn techniques for meaningful youth participation and understand the policy-making process of design, implementation, and accountability.

Before you embark on your advocacy journey, be mindful that it is a long process toward sustainable and impactful change. There is no magic stick to change the world!. As a young novice change maker, you need to familiarise yourself with these crucial advocacy elements:

This guide is designed to be handy and interactive for young advocates worldwide. It contains multiple tools from key road safety partners to enhance your advocacy efforts to promote road safety and sustainable mobility from local to global levels.

Your community and you are the experts on your own needs to transform cities into healthier, safer, sustainable and resilient spaces. In the following sections, you will find tools that will support you on strategic thinking related to advocacy and campaigns, webinars to go deeper into the relationships between road safety sustainable agenda, downloadable tools that will help you set up your talking points with decision-makers, and case studies about successful advocacy for policy change on road safety and sustainable mobility.

YOUTH AND THE TOOLKIT

At YOURS, we believe that young people have a right to be involved in solving the issues that affect them most. There is no greater issue for youth aged 5-29 than their #1 killer: road crashes. YOURS’ #1 demand to decision-makers is to incorporate meaningful youth participation into their road safety strategies, especially with the older youth aged
18 to 35 passionate about enhancing road safety and promoting sustainable mobility in their local communities and cities.

Meaningful youth participation is vital to creating inclusive and sustainable societies in the broader Sustainable Development Agenda. It is achieved when young people’s experiences, ideas, expertise and perspectives are systematically integrated into programmatic, policy and decision-making institutions (Women Deliver, 2016). Many governments and international organisations address it and promote it. You can access the Module ‘Meaningful Youth Participation in Road Safety’ in our YOURS Academy to learn more about the topic in detail.

Meaningful youth participation is not an end goal in itself; it is a mechanism that YOURS integrates across all projects and advocacy messages connected to the road safety agenda.

ADVOCACY AND CAMPAIGNS

Advocacy is the deliberate and strategic effort to promote, protect, and advance a particular cause, policy, or idea. It involves various activities toinfluence decision-makers, public opinion, and societal norms or behaviours. These activities include lobbying, campaigning, grassroots organising, public speaking, media engagement, and coalition-building. Advocacy is a long-term process that aims to contribute to policy design, implementation, and accountability.

Rather than pushing a personal opinion or objective, advocates create awareness of a problem or an issue as a representative of a broader group or cause. The overall goal of advocacy is to influence key people who have the power to make decisions about your cause to implement laws, policies or solutions that benefit the cause and facilitate policy change and the development we aspire to see. So, in summary, advocacy “ is the art of getting someone with power to do something that they would not otherwise do.” (The Democracy Center, 2022).

Campaigns are coordinated efforts to achieve specific goals within a set timeframe, to mobilise support and resources to effect change on a particular issue or cause. (YOURS, 2024). Campaigns typically have one or more specific goals, which vary depending on the issue being addressed and the intended audience.