FedEx has donated 100 car seats to be given to families in Moldova.
Local partners of the Eastern Alliance for Safe and Sustainable Transport (EASST), a United Kingdom-based nonprofit, will test the safety of the car seats and donate them to families most in need.
Last year in Moldova, there were 414 road crashes that involved children; 20 died and 266 more were severely injured. Those numbers represent a 158 % increase from 2017 in the number of kids seriously traumatized by car crashes, according to the Automobile Club of Moldova.
The prohibitive cost of good quality restraints and child car seats that meet international safety standards is thought to be a main reason for the spike, as many families in Moldova struggle to afford them and frequently go without them, local road safety experts report.
“We take road safety very seriously and were saddened to hear that children have lost their lives in road crashes due to a lack of vital safety equipment,” Jon Stockton, a vice president at FedEx Express said in a statement.
FedEx Express, a subsidiary of FedEx Corp., earlier this month in London announced the new campaign to encourage its employees to donate their unneeded car seats. The express transportation company said the initiative, developed to help raise awareness about safety issues and reduce traffic deaths, is part of the company’s FedEx Cares program on road safety for children.
“The donated child car seats will enable us to ensure safer journeys for children in Moldova,” Emma Sophia MacLennan, founder and director general of EASST, said in a statement.
EASST’s network of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) works to improve road conditions in 14 countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, where road deaths are particularly high and vehicle fleets are growing.
“We are very grateful to FedEx staff for their generous donations and our partners are looking forward to distributing the seats to families who have requested our help to keep their children safe,” MacLennan added.
In a recent interview for Forbes, MacLennan detailed how her organization helped Moldova progress from being “one of the most dangerous countries for road users to one of the safest in Eastern Europe, with a better safety record than the U.S.”
The car seat donation platform is just one example of how EASST and the Automobile Club of Moldova have used innovative and evidence-based high-impact solutions to help the overall decrease in road traffic casualties in the country and keep road safety on the political agenda, Emily Carr, EASST’s donations and project coordinator, told Forbes.
“Over the last 10 years the road traffic fatality rate in this small Eastern European country has decreased by almost 50%,” she said.
Date: September 07, 2019
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