Caltex determined to help Govt. reduce road accident fatalities

Road accidents cause the most number of annual deaths in Sri Lanka. On an average 150 road accidents and six deaths occur on a daily basis.

Caltex has stepped forward for the fifth consecutive year, together with the Sri Lanka Traffic Police, to make Sri Lankan roads safer for citizens, especially child commuters, through its ‘Drive Wise & Embrace Life’ mass media communication campaign.

The company’s concerted efforts to increase awareness through thought-provoking campaign messages on road safety since 2009 are all part of a long-term CSR plan conceptualised by Caltex to curtail the epidemic proportions of road accident injuries and fatalities in Sri Lanka.

The campaign ‘Drive Wise & Embrace Life’ was designed with a special emphasis given to children. To date, over Rs. 20 million has been invested by Caltex towards road safety initiatives impacting the social and economic development of the country.

“Each year, millions of rupees are incurred by the Government towards hospitalisation due to the high occurrence of road accidents and injuries in the country. Several innocent children and adults succumb to fatal injuries caused by negligent and reckless driving and commuting behaviours. We strongly believe that sustainable improvement in road safety will follow only once the reckless behaviours of motorists and pedestrians can be positively influenced and impacted through repetitive awareness and reinforcement,” commented Kishu Gomes, Managing Director/CEO, Chevron Lubricants Lanka PLC.

“As such, all our road safety CSR initiatives to date have been developed on the premise of creating more awareness and reinforcement among commuters across all walks of life. After all, safety is everyone’s responsibility,” he continued.

Corporate responsibility is embodied in the organisation’s values and the way it operates. The social responsibility projects carried out by Chevron is driven largely by a commitment to socio-economic development, based on research that considers the medical, social, economic, and cultural dynamics shaping the future of Sri Lanka. According to the organisation, community partnerships and being socially responsible are fundamental to the broader success of the business as it assists in ways that help stimulate economic growth and enable communities to prosper.

According to the Global status report on road safety 2013 published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the report suggests the following statistics regarding the groups most at risk of road fatalities:

• Pedestrians and cyclists constitute 27% of all road deaths. In some countries this figure is higher than 75%, demonstrating decades of neglect of the needs of these road users in current transport policies, in favour of motorised transport.
• 59% of those who are killed in road traffic crashes are between the ages of 15 and 44 years, and 77% are male.
• The risk of dying as a result of a road traffic injury is highest in the WHO African Region at 24.1 per 100 000 population and lowest in the WHO European Region at 10.3 per 100,000 population.