Between Mexico and Nigeria: Youth advocacy at grassroots levels
Ana presenting the Liga Peatonal work with the Colegio de Arquitectos del Mar de Cortés (Cortes Sea’s Architects Guild)
Last year, we supported 17 youth leaders to implement their Local Actions projects. Ana Rodríguez from Mexico and Simon Patrick Obi from Nigeria were among the 17 lucky winners. Their projects prioritized advocacy and awareness and focused on two different road safety challenges.
They worked closely with decision-makers throughout multiple activities to promote meaningful youth participation by influencing the local road safety agenda. What was their experience? And what can governments do to support the endeavors of young people like Ana and Simon? Let’s find out!
Ana resenting online Paso a Paso (Recommendations to integrate the Pedestrian Rights on the Local Normative) on the Mobility Authorities Association congress (the Association of State Mobility officials from Mexico)
Ana Rodriguez is an urbanist and architect in Mexico, she works as a consultant and university teacher. She has also served as an activist for pedestrians and the city since 2012. She implemented her Local Actions project as the general coordinator of Liga Peatonal. Here is a conversation we had with her;
Ana, what policy gap were you trying to address through your Local Actions Project?
We were trying to address the continuity and financing of road safety projects since these did not belong yet to a specific program or plan. Even if they were mentioned within the plan, there’s no specific task or intervention for the local governments to implement. Because of this, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and mobility collectives had to permanently work on these projects so that they were included on the political agenda and so necessary interventions were done to improve the streets.
There was a recent update in Mexico about the nationwide legal framework for mobility and road safety. Our main interest is to establish a local process to position the importance of aligning the legal framework to push the road safety agenda forward so that it would be easier to access the local budget and accelerate the interventions pointing to the school zones as priority areas in city development.
What are the primary results of the project that you were most proud of?
In Tijuana, American Mexican Association (AMA) came up with an agreement with the municipal council to fund the safe school zones intervention this year. This resulted in an improved school zone in one of the high schools in Ensenada. As Liga Peatonal, we were also invited to contribute to the Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development (SEDATU) World Research Institute (WRI), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in providing information for the national publication on the Harmonization Guidelines for the new Mobility and Road Safety Law for Local Governments.
The invitation was made possible through Liga Peatonal’s own publication, Pedestrian Recommendations, which was created to create more influence on the creation and implementation of local road safety frameworks.
We also spoke with Simon Patrick Obi - a committed and passionate road safety and sustainable mobility advocate with more than nine years of experience. Here is our conversation with him;
What policy gap did you try to address through your Local Actions Project?
We identify that young people were not meaningfully engaged in the road safety decision-making process despite making up the greatest percentage of casualties on our roads. We also observed that there were government programs aimed at engaging youth in road safety but there weren’t any policies backing them up. The programs did not mandate stakeholders to work closely with youth; there wasn’t even enough pushback to tap the ingenuity that lies within young people. Youth remain to be spectators in issues that have remained their leading killer; road traffic crashes.
What are the primary results of the project that you were most proud of?
I am happy to share that a national committee on meaningful youth participation in road safety was formed by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Transportation as a direct result of our project. I was given the privilege to suggest nominees to this national committee on meaningful youth participation in road safety.
Secondly, we successfully organized and held the first-ever national stakeholders’ workshop on meaningful youth participation in Abuja Nigeria with participation from the Nigeria Ministry of Transportation, Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), Federal Ministry of Youth, World Health Organization (WHO), and several NGOs. We used the occasion to present the Policymakers’ Toolkit on Meaningful Youth Participation to those who attended. Similarly, a joint communique on meaningful youth participation was produced by the government and our organization the GreenLight Initiative.
Can you tell us about the obstacles you faced and what you did to overcome them?
My experience is mainly with the federal decision-makers in a law updating process that has already been completed. The stage we are currently at regards public policy design at a federal level where we participate as citizens and as members of non-governmental organizations to get relevant ideas and perspectives. In a parallel way, we have the process on a local level with our allies in Tijuana and Ensenada and the perspective is totally different.
As my Mexican counterpart works with the municipal autonomy nationwide, we have been working with the federal officers to have a clear vision with a concrete understanding of the main issues around the road safety topic. At the moment, even with world organizations and international cooperation budgets, the local officers’ vision cannot see the importance of having a clear-cut road safety approach to existing and upcoming infrastructure improvements. We see a limited reach in our work but is currently the only way to really advocate for road safety because, at the end of the day, the local officers are the ones that make the interventions and changes that we need. This is something we, as NGOs, used to create with crossroad paintings and tactical urbanism interventions.
Here are some tidbits of Simon’s experience while implementing his Local Actions project;
“My experience working with decision makers can be liken to drilling a borehole in a desert
First, I had to deal with cynicism from decision makers For them, it wasn’t a common happening to see a young person propagate road safety messaging. It therefore, took me time and lot of work to proof that perception wrong.
Secondly, Not being in the class of decision makers was another obstacle I had to struggle with. Decision makers are more likely to pay more attention to people within their class than a young person who is just coming up, however, I was lucky enough to have connections that played key roles by putting in words during the project implementations.
Thirdly, lack of financial resources. However, through partnership, we were able to leverage government resources to make that happen. Altogether, I will was say that my membership in the Global Youth Coalition for Road Safety played a major role in helping me surmount the above setbacks. I recalled an instance where a particular decision maker didn’t quite believe nor trust our push for meaningful youth inclusion in road safety, until, he did personal research and found some of the work we have done at the Global Youth Coalition for Road Safety, only then, did he believed and started working with us on the project.”
The Ensenada team meeting with the Local Council for Finance Road Safety Projects