INTRODUCTION

Understanding the needs and concerns of different stakeholders is important to ensure proposed changes have support and will be effective.

Depending on the situation, this may involve partnership working across sectors – public authorities, civil society and international partners can all have a vital role to play. Strong coalitions and long-term relationships built on evidence and trust are vital.

SAFE STREETS

Networking and collaborating widely with different groups can help you to understand shared interests and build trust. The education sector is a key starting point and important partner for improvements around schools, providing evidence and assisting with advocacy and implementation.

This section highlights that engagement with road agencies and local authorities is crucial to successful infrastructure initiatives as detailed design and implementation cannot take place without their collaboration. Health and environmental groups may also be important stakeholders. Effective leadership, with buy-in from politicians, can help achieve success.

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Strong coalitions are greater than the sum of their parts. The Child Health Initiative is an excellent example, focusing on ensuring safe and healthy journeys to school. It brought together organisations with technical expertise, advocacy, and a focus on child health, rights, and mobility, creating a global partnership platform. Each organisation offers a unique skillset.

The approaches outlined in this toolkit rely on effective coalitions. For example: The WHO has played a key role disseminating best practices on road safety among partners particularly through the Tool icon UN Road Safety Collaboration. A partnership of the London Sustainability Exchange (LSx) UN Environment and Clean Air Asia has worked to reduce air pollution around schools, highlighting initiatives in London, New Delhi, and Nairobi.

UNICEF has joined forces with technical experts AMEND and iRAP to reduce child road traffic injury. The National Center for Safe Routes to School and ITDP have strengthened each other’s efforts to help Mexico and the US aim for zero deaths among youth, through Vision Zero for Youth.

Child Health Initiative partners conduct their own and joint advocacy to achieve the broader goal of a safe and healthy journey to school. There are two types of advocacy which can be carried out together: advocacy to achieve a specific legislative or policy change; and advocacy to raise awareness or promote behavior change.

In its Tool icon guide to road safety advocacy for NGOs, the foundation for this section, WHO describes ways advocacy can be used, such as increasing funding for road safety or helping to change public misconceptions about road traffic crashes. It has helpful checklists to guide you through the process.

The WHO established the UN Road Safety Collaboration, an informal group to facilitate cooperation and coordination among entities committed to saving lives on roads. Tool icon The page also includes a helpful terms of reference.

  1. Follow the data. Effective policies may contradict public perceptions (the need and efficacy of helmets, or the level of risk posed to people by speeding, etc). Data is necessary to prove effectiveness and change public opinion. Collaborate with organizations with smaller scale programme interventions demonstrating the effectiveness of a policy or behaviour change. In pedestrian safety, this could be community level traffic calming, or small scale infrastructure improvements. Use international examples.

  2. Be strategic. Do your homework and be realistic about what you can achieve. Rather than advocating for road safety broadly or a wide range of policies, target and prioritise policy areas, for example: speed limits around schools, child motorcycle helmets, etc. This should correspond to the current legislative agenda. Conduct a mapping to understand key players.

  3. Avoid duplication. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Find existing organizations that offer materials to support your initiatives, and tailor them to suit your needs.

  4. Speak with one voice. To achieve your objective, build a multi-sectoral partnership/coalition that includes relevant government agencies, police, education sector, local authorities, civil society, media, private sector, transportation and infrastructure providers, etc. Establish a strategic approach with clear lines of accountability and mandate, objectives, targets, and an estimate of financial and other resources required. Agree upon consistent messaging.

  5. Start small: Before implementing a full phased programme, it can be useful conduct a trial, or pilot, to demonstrate effectiveness and results. Use the results to scale up the programme and modify it to get best results.

  6. Connect policy advocacy (promoting specific legislation) and public advocacy (awareness raising and behavior change). Focus on strengthening legislation and enforcement mechanisms, while bolstering data and monitoring. For example, public engagement and education creates a demand for speed management and garners public support for stronger penalties, more enforcement and road engineering changes.

  7. Be context-specific: In some settings, it may be best to use a visible approach, through mass media or organizing events for the public, while in others it may be more effective to focus on meetings with key policy-makers, or a combination of both. For example, consider hosting policy seminars/workshops, or presentations from road safety experts to legislators, briefing policy makers, launching a focused road safety week/day focused on your specific advocacy effort.

  8. Identify champions: Prominent politicians, family members of road traffic victims, celebrity ambassadors help spearhead a push for policy change. NGOs representing victims often lend powerful voices to influence change. The Tool icon Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety offers a collection of NGOs which have achieved impressive success.

  9. Engage the media and communicate results: Address common road safety misconceptions to build momentum via the media. This can help create a demand for road safety around schools, garner public support for stronger penalties, and encourage more enforcement and road engineering changes. Useful tools for media engagement on road safety can be found in the Tool icon WHO’s road safety media brief.

  10. Evaluate performance. Identify measures of success to compare progress before and after your efforts. Don’t be afraid to change the plan if it’s not working. In speed management, evaluation is critical to informing public debate around speed management strategies and scaling up best practices. Remember that momentum and support on road safety can take time to build, and policy/legislative processes are usually relatively lengthy.
  1. Are interventions being coordinated horizontally across agencies to achieve the desired focus on results?

  2. Are interventions being coordinated vertically between national, regional, provincial and city agencies to achieve the desired focus on results?

  3. Have committees and procedures supporting the coordination process been established to achieve the desired focus on results?

The Tool icon WHO’s Road Safety Media Brief helps support journalists producing stories on road safety, and can be used as background research for advocacy efforts.

The Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety has a webinar on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and how you can work to achieve them through advocacy:

If you are advocating for specific legislation or policy change, you will be engaging with government and policy-makers. Though they may be the target of your efforts, working with key internal advocates from the beginning can make all the difference in finding common ground and accomplishing your objectives.

First, be up to date on the status of road safety in the country, and the status of your proposed advocacy target. Summaries are available in the WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety, further details and analysis may be available from the WHO Country Office/Region. Talk to government officials and those working on the front line, as well as experts.

Identify the relevant legislative/policy mechanisms. Understand the legislative system, and seek guidance from experts, including law-makers themselves. Identify points in the law-making/policy process where there are opportunities to provide input. For example, in some countries, once the legislative process itself is under way, there may be opportunities for the public to comment on a draft law before it is finalized.

Identify and engage with key players and key champion legislators. We suggest this Tool icon guide to political mapping from the Global Road Safety Partnership. Based on your mapping, add coalition members that have influence over key decision makers. They should represent various sectors of society who share a common concern, but bring different types of knowledge and expertise to the effort. Partners may come from civil society, national or local government, academia, the media, the private sector or other areas of society. Choose partners who are well-respected and have experience in road safety – road safety NGOs, victims groups, transportation organisations, automobile clubs, etc.

Speed management policies, for example, require a multi-stakeholder involvement and participation. Securing broad support from different stakeholders though joint working groups and advisory groups is critical. Involving the police, medical services, judicial agencies, local communities, civil society, transport authorities, and school representatives with a clear division about their individual roles in furthering the process is key.

Arm yourself with data. For example, if you are focusing on speeding, you may not have speeding data for an entire city, but you may have it for a specific area. If you do not have any data, you can use data about the general danger of speeding, or do a small-scale study with free apps that measure speed (Tool icon see DATA). Disseminating these results or other high impact case study materials via the media is also effective.

If your efforts are working, you will probably face opposition. Be sure to anticipate this and prepare counter arguments.

The Tool icon WHO’s guide to road safety advocacy has a helpful checklist to get started, on page 12.

The Global Road Safety Partnership road safety advocacy toolkit contains a Tool icon political mapping guide.

Johns Hopkins University offers a Tool icon free online course to advocate for road safety legislation.

The Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety helps NGOs apply the star-rating concept, an aim by the Tool icon Three Star Coalition to ensure that roads in developing countries meet a minimum safety standard of three stars.

A beneficiary of any policy, awareness raising, or behavior change initiative - the community, and particularly children - are key advocacy and coalition partners. Well-researched, thoughtful, sustained community engagement is key.

First, pre-test community messaging and materials with representative groups from different affected communities. Once your messaging is set, involve journalists in your efforts to carry your message for you, and mobilise partners and communities to support and implement your communications plan. In Cambodia, AIP Foundation partnered with FIA Foundation and USAID to empower journalists to utilize their platforms to increase road safety awareness and create positive policy changes in their country.

As government serves the community, the community plays an integral role in strengthening government expertise and advocacy. Workshops can provide a platform for knowledge sharing between the two. Additionally, they can also be used to support the media to understand the importance of a particular road safety intervention. In Thailand, AIP Foundation convened educators and community advocates to develop policy strategies for the government to improve school bus safety standards. This resulted in the launch of a public-private partnership between the Thai government and multi-sector stakeholders focused on school bus safety requirements and management systems.

Community trainings are also helpful. Train-the-trainer models can help build community capacity, particularly by using communicators that are dynamic and reflect the community demographic, such as animators, peer educators, health workers, teachers and young people. For example, Tool icon Safe Kids Worldwide/ChildSafe improved car seat safety through an international train-the-trainer scheme. 

Manage and monitor community engagement activities. Ideally, use community monitoring systems among targeted groups. Based on the monitoring data, adjust activities and materials accordingly. Programme and service delivery data, (e.g. helmet wearing rates, use of safe crossings), also serve as monitoring information and should be used to modify communication activities or messages.

Evaluate and re-plan. Based on the desired results, assess outcomes and if possible any behavioural impact. Disseminate results to partners - including targeted communities – and determine the need for follow-up and for continued support.

A note about behaviour change initiatives: Behaviour change in particular must have public buy-in. However, in road safety, isolated awareness campaigning or behaviour change education is proven to only have limited results and is always best combined with effective legislation/enforcement and the implementation of safe road infrastructure. Though behaviour change campaigns have minimal impact and only work in certain circumstances, they are four times more effective when combined with enforcement. Road safety behaviour change campaigns alone are generally less successful than other areas of public health. Like other public health behaviour change campaigns, the intervention must be sustained over long periods of time to have any beneficial effect, often not the most effective use of resources.

For developing mass media campaigns in low- and middle-income countries, we suggest Tool icon WHO’s mass media campaigns toolkit. Much of the basic principles also apply to social media.

The Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety has a Tool icon guide to improving your social media engagement.

The Tool icon WHO webpage and the Tool icon WHO YouTube channel has an excellent database of media campaigns.

Ideally, efforts should always be scalable and replicable. Pilot projects are a helpful testing ground to address challenges before scaling up. When replicating or scaling an initiative, it should be modified to be context specific. Partnership with local, established organizations is key to respecting cultural sensitivities and norms, and to ensuring sustainability. Building good relationships with local government is critical to scale up activities. Ideally, programme and projects should develop into embedded programmes owned and run by government entities.

Turning personal grief at the death in a road crash of her daughter Zenani into high profile activism, Zoleka Mandela is a powerful advocate for safer roads and particularly for child rights.

Zoleka launched her ‘Zenani Mandela Campaign’ in 2012 and was the leading figure behind the ‘Long Short Walk’ in 2013, which saw thousands of people from Cape Town to Washington DC taking to the streets to demand action for road safety in the Sustainable Development Goals. She has since advocated for child rights internationally, speaking at the Global High Level Conference on Road Safety in 2015, the World Urban Forum in 2018, and the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs in 2018, and other forums.

Award-winning actress and road safety activist Michelle Yeoh is a UN Goodwill Ambassador who lends her powerful voice to raise awareness and mobilise support for safe and healthy mobility.

Since 2008 Michelle has been a road safety ambassador, for the Make Roads Safe campaign and the FIA Foundation. She is currently the Spokesperson for the FIA’s High Level Panel for Road Safety. She led the ‘Call for a Decade of Action’ in 2008-2009 and spoke on the issue at the UN General Assembly on behalf of her own country, Malaysia, in 2010 and 2014. Her work supporting road safety in Cambodia was recognised by the Deputy Prime Minister in 2014. She spoke at the World Bank Annual Meeting in 2017, the UN High Level Political Forum in 2018, and many other events.

Internationally acclaimed for her roles in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Ang Lee’s multiple Academy Award-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its recently released sequel; and portraying Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s biopic The Lady, Michelle Yeoh has transferred her skills to the small screen in two BBC documentaries on road safety, produced by the FIA Foundation. For the documentaries, Michelle spoke with road traffic victims, argued on screen with highway engineers, visited hospitals and dodged traffic to highlight the need for action.

Successful coalitions and advocacy efforts fill a void. This was certainly the case for the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety, which addressed the fact that there was no coalition to harness the power of NGOs to advocate for road safety and road traffic injury victims.

In 2010, the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRST) surveyed 200 road safety NGOs, and found that 9 out of 10 of the 70 nongovernmental organizations that participated agreed that a lead nongovernmental coordinating global body would be valuable to their efforts.

On behalf of a larger network, nine nongovernmental members of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration – Amend, Association for Safe International Road Travel, European Federation of Road Traffic Victims, Fundación Gonzalo Rodríguez, Handicap International Belgium, International Federation of Pedestrians, Laser International, Safe Kids Worldwide and YOURS: Youth for Road Safety – founded the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety. Together, they speak with one voice mobilize and empower NGOs from around the world, make roads safer for all, and advocate for road victims’ rights.

It is a broad coalition, and all NGOs with a primary focus on road safety, aligned to the Alliance’s mission, with a successful track record of implementation for three years or more are welcome to apply. The coalition regularly produces capacity-building materials, available for free on their website.

The Child Health Initiative works closely with its partner AMEND in Africa to scale up and replicate success via their School Area Road Safety Assessment and Improvement (SARSAI) in the region and abroad.

In Jamaica, UNICEF, iRAP, AMEND, the JN Foundation, and government partners exchanged lessons learned to assess risk for thousands of children on their journey to school and implement ‘safe system’ infrastructure solutions to address road traffic injury.

The project kicked off with a forum convened jointly by the Jamaican Government, its National Road Safety Council and the Child Health Initiative. It involved all the major stakeholders in Jamaica, UNICEF and international partner representatives including from AMEND, iRAP, the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. Jamaica’s double Olympic sprint champion Elaine Thompson gave a keynote speech and Transport Minister Lester Michael Henry signed up to the #EveryLife Declaration for every child’s right to safe and healthy streets.

A few months later, UNICEF convened a workshop on child traffic injury prevention and safe and healthy journeys to schools with implementation partners. The workshop supported partners in Jamaica in learning from the experiences of SARSAI programme and iRAP’s Safe Rating for Schools app. AMEND and IRAP shared practical knowledge on how to design, implement and conduct impact assessments of infrastructural measures to address specific risks around schools. The workshop also involved hands-on road infrastructure assessment around Denham Town and Hazard primary schools. Participants in the workshop included representatives of the Ministry of Transport and Mining–Road Safety Unit, the National Road Safety Council, the Jamaica Constabulary Force, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information, the Jamaica Social & Investment Fund, UNICEF and the JN Foundation.

In Morocco, iRAP and AMEND worked alongside the Mobilité Club Maroc (MCM) to provide safe journeys to school. In a workshop hosted by the MCM, the club and local partners were provided with training from iRAP and AMEND on assessing, rating and implementation to improve safety on the road network around the schools. The International Road Federation is also collaborating as a project partner.

At Rhamna Primary, the MCM and its partners will use iRAP’s ‘Star Rating for Schools’ methodology to assess the safety of the surrounding road network, and will present a 1-5 star rating. The partners will also work with AMEND to identify which countermeasures – such as safe sidewalks, road humps and crossings - should be implemented to reduce risk and improve safety. MCM hopes to scale up project work at two further schools.

In Vietnam, a strong partnership of government agencies, international donors and bodies like the World Bank and UNICEF, road safety NGOs and private companies worked together for several years in a ‘helmet wearing coalition’ to build public awareness and implement a helmet standard, legislation and strong police enforcement. The results, since 2007, have been dramatic: helmet wearing rates of more than 85% in urban areas, a 12% reduction in fatalities, a 24% reduction in serious injury and a consequent saving to the Vietnamese government of at least US$200 million.

To transfer the lessons and techniques learnt in Vietnam to assist other countries, the AIP Foundation established the Global Helmet Vaccine Initiative (GHVI) in 2009, with a vision of ‘A helmet on every head in the Decade of Action’. As well as continuing its work in Vietnam, GHVI expanded to neighbouring Cambodia and Thailand and is partnered with campaigners in Africa, Europe and Latin America.

In Cambodia, the ‘Cambodian Helmet Vaccine Initiative’ established a national office staffed by local road safety practitioners, building a strong relationship with the police and government and securing funding from corporations. The program’s core elements included: research, monitoring & evaluation, working in partnership and with the financial support of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and with Handicap International; providing technical assistance, for example through advising on the introduction of Cambodia’s new helmet standard and draft helmet legislation; public awareness education (the initiative’s ‘One Helmet. One Life’ campaign included an 8 part soap opera ‘Regrets’ on national TV about the impact of a road crash on a typical Cambodian family. The TV drama was introduced with a personal video commendation from the Prime Minister); and free provision of crash helmets to low-income children. The Cambodian Helmet Vaccine Initiative also cooperated closely with other partners working on helmet safety, including the ‘Road Safety in 10 Countries’ program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and led by the WHO national office in Phnom Penh.

Replicating success, another national coalition was established in Uganda, where Road Safety Fund financial support was complemented by CDC and the Global Road Safety Facility. The project had three key objectives: to build political awareness and support for helmet safety interventions; to support the Kampala police in their efforts to drive up helmet use amongst ‘boda boda’ motorcycle taxi drivers and their passengers; and to support government efforts to implement a new helmet standard. The World Bank facilitated a high-level mentoring workshop for senior Ugandan police officers with members of Road Pol, the World Bank’s traffic police advisory network. A national office was founded with a local director, working with local partners including the Automobile Association of Uganda, with an emphasis on building sustainable local capacity.

Building coalitions is about illustrating common issues that can be easily understood by all stakeholders. When building coalitions for children, we must include the perspectives of the most powerful and essential advocates – children themselves. Bernard van Leer Foundation has published several film series to illustrate the perspective of children.

Their ‘Beginning of Life’ documentary shines a light on the importance of the early years by documenting the lives of young children and their families across the world – interspersed with clips from early childhood development experts explaining key issues. These short clips from the documentary are grouped by theme (caregivers, nutrition, brain development, nurturing care, learning, play, policy and examples) which can easily be navigated from the menu on the left side of the page.

Watch Bernard Van Leer Foundation’s Beginning of Life videos

Their Young Explorers videos illustrate the perspectives of some of the over one billion children who live in cities. Cities can be wonderful places to grow up, but they can also pose serious challenges for the health and well-being of babies, toddlers and the people who care for them – from a lack of nature and safe spaces to play, to air pollution and traffic congestion, to social isolation.

In five short films, toddlers take you along their daily hometown journeys in two very different cities – Pune in India and Recife in Brazil. Join Ahaan, Mokshada, Lulu, Elloah and Ze as they travel their streets with the people who care for them and share the opportunities and challenges they encounter every day.

Watch Bernard Van Leer Foundation’s Young explorers videos

Another series, Walking with Amadou, follows a three-year-old girl as she makes her way to the market in Dakar with her mother. It is the first in a series of nine videos called Walking with Amadou, produced by ImagiNation Afrika, that will follow different children in the city.

Funded as part of our Urban95 work, the project aims to increase awareness of what it is like to experience Dakar from a height of 95cm, with a view to engaging citizens across West Africa in a public dialogue on the lived experiences of young children and their caregivers in urban environments.

Watch Bernard Van Leer Foundation’s Walking with Amadou

Contains excerpts from Bernard van Leer Foundation document

CLEAN AIR

Several air quality management (AQM) processes are reinforced by partnerships across sectors and stakeholders. In schools, an active network of school administrators, staff, educators, students and their parents, and the community members and local decisionmakers within the school vicinity can be harnessed. Proactive stakeholder engagement ensures a sense of ownership and accountability which can secure collective commitment towards achieving air quality improvements.

This section explains how capacity building, awareness raising, and communications planning are bolstered by collaborations to ensure effective and efficient implementation of air pollution abatement strategies and programs.

About the Toolkit

This toolkit provides teachers with easy-to-use and engaging lesson plans, activities, and other resources to teach students about the connections between air quality, health, weather, and other related science topics. It also suggests actions which students can take to protect their health and reduce emissions.

This toolkit builds the capacity of educators in enriching school children’s knowledge about the status of air around them. The toolkit uses a color-coded scale and maps to provide daily air quality information based on children’s observations. These activities build and empower young children and educators in participating in air quality monitoring in their own ways.

The toolkit includes the following features:

  • Key messages – Bullet point lists of key air quality messages for each age group
    • Grades K through 2
    • Grades 3 through 5
    • Grades 6 through 8

  • Additional activities – Brief descriptions of other activities about air quality that teachers can conduct with students

  • Handouts – Simple one-page, age-appropriate handouts for students on air quality that highlight how they can protect health and the environment

  • Background information – Resources for teachers on air quality, the AQI, and related air pollution impacts, including fact sheets and bibliography of curricula, lesson plans, activities, publications and websites

  • National Science Education Standards – Education Standards met listed for each lesson plan

Toolkit Use and Target Users

The toolkit can be used by:

  • Educators to enrich schoolchildren’s knowledge on the fundamental concepts of air quality, impacts of air pollution, and means of communicating air quality information through the AQI.


The toolkit can be accessed through this website.

About the Toolkit

The Youth Advocacy Toolkit provides materials and guidelines for young people who want to start an advocacy platform/campaign. It provides support in the development of skills and information needed by children and young people who want to speak up and actively take part in decisions that may affect their lives, such as better air quality.

Although the toolkit is centered on young people and educators it can also be used to inspire a group to work on certain advocacies and create action plans to achieve the change they want to see and achieve.

With the guide questions from the toolkit, the user can create an action plan to realize an advocacy of interest. The following are the steps that the toolkit suggests:

Step 1: Explore

This includes picking an issue or a change that the user wants to see. A problem statement and a vision will be identified in this step.

Step 2: Think

The activity includes coming up with actions to address the identified problem through different brainstorming techniques. The advocacy or campaign’s objectives and targets will be the outputs of this step

Step 3: Act

The key message of the campaign will be formulated in this step. Tactics/mechanisms on how the message will be sent out to the public or to the concerned stakeholders will also be planned. Risk assessment will be done and management strategies for the action plan will be formulated.

Step 4: Evaluate

Evaluating the campaign’s progress will help the user enrich the next steps that should be taken to maximize impact.

Toolkit Use and Target Users

The toolkit can be used by:

  • Educators to employ a systematic mentoring and critical approach to identify issues (including social, environmental, political) that are relevant to schoolchildren, and subsequently formulate advocacy and action plans to achieve change.

The toolkit presents activities and assessment needed to be done to fully realize an advocacy or campaign. For detailed guidance, please access the toolkit here.

About the Toolkit

Air quality communications can help people understand the problems and the issues involved, the pressing need for solutions, the overall mitigation process, and the benefits and co-benefits of proposed solutions, which will help to bolster broader public buy-in. Communications will also enable governments to demonstrate impact and results, which in turn will strengthen support for the mitigation policies actions being undertaken.

Recent episodes of extreme air pollution in many cities in Asia have highlighted the difficulties faced by city officials in effectively communicating air quality, mitigation and policy measures, health impacts and protection, and preventive strategies to the public. The challenges are common to many city governments throughout Asia, with gaps evident in local government communications capacity, messaging, and information dissemination - particularly for those most vulnerable and at risk, including school children.

The toolkit seeks to address those challenges and provide communications planning guidance for city governments and relevant stakeholders to support broader AQM efforts and the implementation of mitigation measures.

 

Toolkit Use and Target Stakeholders

The participation of stakeholders in a government’s AQM efforts is essential in ensuring broader public buy-in and more effective overall implementation of mitigation policies and initiatives.

Eliciting stakeholder support requires targeted air quality communications that foster an understanding of the relevance and impacts of the measures being undertaken in their daily lives, and help raise awareness of cities’ air quality status, change public attitudes, and promote more sustainable practices and behaviors.

Effective stakeholder engagement also helps to lessen misgivings, opposition and resistance from different sectors and groups based on their perception of the potential impacts of mitigation measures on their operations, business practices, established protocols, and livelihoods. Information, education and communication campaigns that highlight the economic and health co-benefits of AQM can help increase acceptance among stakeholders and provide a platform for the open exchange of information.

The toolkit can be used by the following users:

  • City communication focal point with support from local policy and decisionmakers (including City Executives) to build the city’s capacity for strategic air quality communication planning and support the implementation of air quality monitoring (see Data section), Clean Air Action Plans (see Implementation and Design section), and health impacts assessment (see Impacts Assessment section).

  • School administrators and educators to build the capacity of the school in developing and implementing communication strategies and campaigns that consider air quality, its health impacts, and measures to address air pollution that can be implemented at the personal, family, institutional, and community-level.

Guide for Stakeholders to Develop a Communications Plan

1. Map the stakeholders

Stakeholders can be classified according to their required level of support needed to ensure successful mitigation efforts, and their level of influence in determining successful implementation:

High support, low influence

These stakeholders can contribute a lot to the implementation of the project and are highly engaged, but they may have low or a lack of influence on mitigation outcomes.

High support, high influence

These are the key stakeholders. They exert a lot of effort, are highly engaged, and have a substantial influence on mitigation outcomes.

Low support, low influence

These stakeholders are neither interested nor have influence, and can be resistant to mitigation efforts.

Low support, high influence

These stakeholders have a substantial influence on the mitigation efforts but minimal to no resources to contribute to implementation/

 

2. Flesh out the components of the communications plan

COMMUNICATIONS PLAN COMPONENTS

OBJECTIVES
  • What is it hoped that the communications plan will achieve in the institution, the community, or the city?
  • What is the vision?
  • Is the intention to broadly raise public awareness, elicit changes in people’s attitudes and behaviors, changes in patterns of consumption, changes in industry practice, influence policy change?
MESSAGES
  • What do you want to tell people?
  • What do you want them to know?
  • What do you want them to do?
  • What are you asking of them?
  • Are your messages reflecting your objectives?
KEY STAKEHOLDERS
  • Who do you need to engage with and enlist support from in the development and implementation of the communications plan?
  • How will those stakeholders be engaged and involved?
SYNERGIES
  • What organizations, social movements or events can you align with to improve outreach and build a broader audience?
TARGET GROUPS
  • Who is the communications plan targeting?
  • What are you trying to achieve with each identified target audience?
  • What do they need to know in order to achieve the objectives of the communications plan?
  • What do they need to do in order to achieve the objectives of the communications plan?
  • What level of knowledge and understanding do they already have?
  • Have the needs of vulnerable and at-risk groups been taken into consideration?
CHALLENGES
  • What communications-related challenges are you facing in developing and implementing the communications plan? Human resources, levels of knowledge, technical capacity, inadequate funding?
  • How will you address gaps and shortfalls that may impede the development and/or implementation of the communications plan or impact on its overall effectiveness?
  • Are there other potential external challenges that may impact on the implementation of the communications plan? And if so, how will those challenges be addressed?
RISK ASSESSMENT
  • What risks are there? These include issues such as the communications plan being negatively received or perceived, and people reacting negatively to being asked to make changes.
  • Have you developed a risk assessment and mitigation plan?
  • What do you need to do to ensure your communications plan is credible, accepted and effective?
COMMUNICATION CHANNELS AND FREQUENCY
  • How will you reach your identified target audiences?
  • What are the most effective channels of communication to disseminate information? What forms will information take?
  • How often will information be disseminated?
MATERIALS AND ACTIVITIES
  • What informational and/or promotional material will be produced and what activities/events will be held?
  • Where and how will material be distributed?
  • Where and when will events be held and how will they be publicized?
BUDGET
  • What budget do you need for the development and implementation of the communications plan?
  • What is budget breakdown for the different components of the communications plan?
  • Is the budget sufficient to ensure the communications plan will be effective and have the desired outcomes?
AVAILABLE RESOURCES
  • What resources are available to you to implement the communications plan?
  • Are additional resources required? If so, how will those resources be procured?
  • What can be produced internally, and what will need to be done externally?
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
  • Who will do what, and what will their specific tasks be?
  • Is there a sufficient number of people assigned for the duration of the communications plan?
TIME FRAME AND ROLL-OUT
  • What is the overall time frame for the development and implementation of the communications plan?
  • Is the time frame sufficient to ensure that objectives will be met? If not, what adjustments need to be made?
  • Within the overall time frame, have short and medium-term points been identified for the purposes of monitoring and evaluation?
  • How will the communications plan be rolled out over time to ensure momentum and continued progression?
MONITORING AND EVALUATION
  • How will progress be monitored and evaluated over time - short, medium and long term?
  • How will your monitoring be used to guide and improve planning?
  • What indicators will be used to track progress?
  • Have the objectives of the campaign been met?
  • If sufficient progress toward achieving objectives has not been made, what provisions are there for adjustments or changes to ensure success?

 

Connecting Classrooms is a British Council initiative to support global learning and international exchange around the Sustainable Development Goals. The Connected Classrooms resource on Sustainable Cities and Communities: Clean Air resource aims to help schools explore and tackle air pollution through critical thinking and problem solving, and creative collaboration.

It was developed by the British Council together with the Child Health Initiative and London Sustainability Exchange (now part of Global Action Plan). The Connecting Classrooms programme is part-funded with UK aid from the British people and helps schools in different parts of the world come together to share experiences and learn together.

You can read more, and access the resources here

The School Run Scandal toolkit is a teaching resource for young people aged 10-14 years old to understand the role of vehicles emissions, particularly in the wake of the Dieselgate Scandal, on their air, health, and environment. It draws on research by The Real World Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE) to build understanding of the impact of vehicles on their streets, encouraging them to undertake their own investigation and develop their personal views about what needs to change about their world and what role they can play as an agent of change for a fairer, cleaner, greener and healthier future.

Created in partnership with the FIA Foundation and Global Action Plan, and hosted on the Transform Our World Hub, it shows young people how to learn, engage and take action on an issue which creates a better future for themselves and their families.

You can read more, and access the resources here.

Clean Air Day is the UK's largest air pollution campaign, engaging thousands of people at hundreds of events, and reaching millions more through the media. Primarily coordinated by the Global Action Plan, the campaign brings and builds a coalition on battling air pollution through multi-sectoral collaboration with communities, businesses, education and the health sector. The has the following objectives:

  • To improve public understanding of air pollution, both indoors and outdoor;

  • To build awareness of the public on how air pollution affects our health;

  • To explain some of the easy solutions which stakeholders can do to tackle air pollution, protect the environment and human health

The campaign holds an annual Clean Air Day which aims to reduce levels of air pollution. Each year, the campaign has its specific behavioral intervention targets anchoring on the central theme of achieving better air quality. In 2018, the campaign was recognized by the Public Health England acknowledging the effectiveness of Clean Air Day in achieving a significant impact on its behavioral intervention targets. The recognition highlights the importance of public engagement in advocacy campaigning.

Clean Air Day 2018’s key success factor is the huge level of support from 200 local authorities, NHS trusts, health charities universities and community groups throughout the country, who run events and communications to encourage as many people as possible to do something different to reduce air pollution. With the grassroots’ synergistic actions coupled with the Global Action Plan’s media and social media campaign, the campaign widens the reach of the advocacy on reducing air pollution. The campaign effectively increased the public’s awareness and support on pollution mitigating measures such as:

  • 60% increase in people who are aware that cyclists often breathe cleaner air than drivers

  • 6% increase in people who choose to walk quieter, less polluted routes.

To sustain this positive impact of the event, the campaign is working on strengthening and expanding their collaboration with different sectors to achieve a year-round impact in cutting air pollution. The campaign’s online platform also has a repository of resources on better air quality campaigns and advocacy materials and references which can be used by different stakeholders such as local governments, educators, students and concerned individuals.