The International Road Safety Academy (IRSA) is a non-profit organization, (association) based in Amsterdam, established in July 2004 as an initiative of the Institute of Traffic Care after the Expert-Meeting held in Apeldoorn 22 – 28 May 2004.

The IRSA aims to demonstrate that the international defined and accepted training programs save lives, reduce social trauma in families, reduce costs significantly and enhance production in enterprises.

During the various road safety expert meetings in 2003 and 2004 between members of the ITC Network and the executed projects of the Institute for Traffic Care - since 1998 - it was emphasized that there was an urgent need in developing countries to introduce high qualitative road police training programs, the improvement of handling collisions and the introduction of a global harmonized collision data collection systems. Local road authorities, policy makers and police officials in a number of developing countries requested support to create better road safety statistics to justify the investments of finances for new roads, to create better road policing and the handling of post-accident situations.

Although police academies in Europe, US and Australia are training traffic police staff members of police schools from a number of developing countries in Asia, Middle East and Africa, it was unfortunately not enough to improve the role of road policing significantly and on large scale. So this initiative must be seen firstly in the light of creating a dissemination process on a larger scale, secondly that the presented training programs will have more up-dated input from various parts of the world and thirdly to create a sustainable situation where local authorities ultimately can carry out the delivered programs independently.

The aims of the IRSA are:

• To train National Traffic Police Trainers, who will be trained as Master-Trainers who on return will train staff in their own countries.
• To organize workshops in the various regions with the objective of raising awareness of the potential of road safety training and getting commitment to initiate project activities.
• The Master-Trainers will train civilians and/or other police officers who, in turn, would run programs in schools, companies and other organizations committed to the reduction of the economic and social costs of collisions.
• To create world-wide acknowledged and certified traffic enforcement training programs working to ISO-standards 10015.

Training programs

The IRSA will mainly focus on the improvement of a large number of traffic enforcement methods, strategy, the use of technology, the handling of collisions, the advisory role with respect to education, engineering and the enforceability of traffic legislation.

Technical committee

The IRSA will install a technical committee of international experts from across the world, including those from developing countries, to discuss and set the quality of the recommended good practice programs and train-the-trainer programs to be used at the IRSA’s.

www.irsa-association.org