Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. Welcome, and thank you very much for joining the AOA webinar, today. I am Tsutomu Matsubara of AOA, and the moderator of this webinar. The theme of this webinar is SDG’s Series Two: Risk Reduction, Good Health, and Disaster Prevention. And we have three wonderful presenters: Ken Sakai, for Kokumin Kyosai Co-op, in Japan, and Kumar Shailabh of Uplift Mutuals in India, and Sarah Macaulay of RAC in Australia. So for English listeners, please keep using simultaneous interpretation. The first presenter will speak Japanese, and I will also speak Japanese for a while.

Ken Sakai:
Once again, good afternoon and as I have been introduced, I am Sakai of Kokumin Kyosai Co-op. Thank you very much for giving me this valuable time today at the AOA webinar. From my side, I’d like to take about a half an hour, or so, and talk about called Kokumin Kyosai Co-op’s. project for disaster prevention and mitigation. I’d like to use the slides to proceed with my talk.

First of all, let me introduce my organization. The official name is the National Federation of Workers and Consumers Kyosai Cooperatives and we provide insurance service for consumers, so we are a consumers co-op. It was established in 1957, so this is the 64th year. After the war in 1954 in Osaka the fire insurance activity missed and at the time there were very few people who could buy insurance. That means that if a disaster occurs many people will be placed in economic hardship and therefore, there needs to be a mutual help. Therefore, we started with this activity and it expanded all over Japan. It’s now a national organization. Sixty-four years have now passed since that time.

Through our insurance activities we want to solve the issues in society and this has been the idea since our founding. We have now, 29.77 million policies and the premium income is 560.3 billion yen. You can see that this is a great mutual assistance. There’s about 125 million people in Japan and that means that a little less than 30 million policies, so you can understand we play a very big role.

On the other hand, if you look at the environment around us it is getting increasingly difficult that as we are an aging society. Population is reducing, and the income gap is widening, and there’s also natural disasters. That means that the difficulties are increasing and that being the environment from our members we want to be chosen. In 2019, we came up with a new brand that is Kokumin Kyosai co-op and we have reinforced our activities. Right now the pandemic is expanding so that the bonds between people are becoming weaker and lifestyles are changing. However, this time we are trying to go digital and use various technologies, so that we can use this to contact our members and to broaden the mutual assistance.

This is our philosophy, “Towards a safe and affluent society with mutual help.” We help each other, that is, with our members we want to go forward and based on that we need to be affluent and safe. As a co-op, I think that this is an important message to communicate and we want to make this easy to understand and communicate.

I mentioned that we changed the brand to Kokumin Kyosai Co-op. Kokumin means everyone, people, and Kyosai means the mutual aid and Co-op well that means that we are a cooperative. This is the message that is included in this Kokumin Kyosai Co-op brand.

Let me talk about businesses in simple terms. I talked about a little less than 30 million policies, well, we have the life and non-life in a broad range. When we originally started, we wanted as many people as possible to be able to receive insurance. That was our mission. Therefore, our insurance is to be able to afford these insurance products, so that as many people as possible can make use of them. That means we have people, and cars, and houses, so this is a wide range of products that are necessary for daily living. With that, we have been trying to provide a sense of security to our members.

However, as I said earlier, our environment has been changing greatly and as you saw in our philosophy, in other words, “safe and affluent society,” to realize that it’s not just enough to have insurance products. Therefore, we are trying to further strengthen our efforts. That is indicated in this slide that is in the case of an emergency or you want to have a provision of sec a sense of security. In the middle, the dark green, this is what if part, the protection part. We want to provide even better protection. That means that it has to be supporting each person’s individual lives, so that it is a program which is optimal for each person.

However, if there is some incident and you need insurance… Well, it would be ideal if such emergencies didn’t happen, so you want to be prepared. This is the prevention part, or what you see at the left, which is pre-crisis. For example, for health. In terms of people you want to enhance health so that you don’t get sick or you don’t get hurt. In terms of cars, well, you want to have a society where accidents don’t occur to begin with. Then in daily living, if there is a large scale disaster you want to have a structure where the effects are mitigated. This is the prevention activities.

If you look at the right side of this figure, it says post-crisis. In other words, after the event. You could prepare, but there could be some incident and some damages. Unfortunately, such things do happen. There could be an accident or even if you get sick, you want to go back to your usual life as soon as possible and we want to provide such support. That means that there will be prompt insurance payouts. You have these three pillars with which we can create a sense of security for the policy holders and members.

Now going on to the next theme. This is the three areas for the community support. Well, you want a safe and affluent society and that is expressed here. Each person is going to prepare, but still to have a safe and affluent society that is quite difficult and so, you have these three major fields that we are in engaged in right now. At the top it says disaster prevention and mitigation, environmental conservation activities, and then also supporting children.

Starting at the top, let’s look at the disaster prevention and mitigation. There are many large scale disasters occurring. Once you have this large scale disaster you want to be able to prevent the large scale disasters and damages. I will introduce details later on.

Then at the bottom left, the second circle. This is the efforts for environmental conservation. That is beautiful nature is indispensable for us, but recently we see lots of natural disasters due to global warming and the abnormal climate changes. We want to also put efforts to suppress those kinds changes. Then at the right, you see the children’s health and well-being. Children will be supporting our future, so we want to remove their hardships so that each child can make challenges. This is the effort for supporting children’s health and well-being.
These three pillars, these may look like different themes, but actually these three areas are deeply linked. Not just now, but towards the future, so that the people can feel a sense of security. I think these are the three major challenges.

We are working in the area of disaster prevention and mitigation projects. Let me cite some concrete examples of what we are doing in this blue area. In doing so we have some slides. We organize events. One of which is the so-called Bosai Cafe. This has been promoted by the Cabinet Office of the national government. You never know when the disasters occur and it’s very difficult to be fully cognizant of such calamities, but to enhance the awareness we are creating opportunities where they’re experiencing a joyous manner what they mean. Every year we organize this Bosai Cafe event 40 to 50 times a year across the country. We have illustrations describe what we are doing.

Disaster prevention covers white areas. We put up the photographs of disasters, we introduced books, and we also introduce some goods, so that people can fully understand the consequences implications of disaster. We also organize quiz, so that they can deepen their understand when the disasters occur. How much do you have to store your food and water? How much of those should be stored in advance? Show us answer with the appropriate amount. Also, we have some experimental show. We also try to invite people to actually experience the implications of disasters. Sometimes we let them eat the food kept for the disasters and also have them experience the life in the evacuation center. We invite the members and also the citizens, not members, but citizens of the area, so that we can deeper and enhance the community communication. They come in families with little children going to primary schools, but this proved to be very popular.

This Bosai Cafe, it’s not that we have a well defined, rigid curriculum, but as is shown on the left hand side, we have the nother experience called Bosai Villa. Disasters come in different forms and different modes. There are differences. The type of disasters require different types of preparedness. The University Corp and Medical Care Corp work together with us and we try to discuss the disaster prevent from the point of view of clothing, food, and housing. We are deeply rooted in the society and we work in partnership with different relevant organizations and entities.

This effort has started since 2008 and already we have experience of conducting this for 450 events all over the world, because of the COVID 19 it is difficult to organize such an event, but once the time is right and when the COVID is over, we’ll like to restart this activity as soon as possible.

Next is for children, shall I say. We go to kindergartens and primary schools and have them experience and understand the need for disaster prevention. Come to grips with the disaster prevention and mitigation and have them talk about the experience at school when they go back with their families, so that if this information could be shared. We have the books and also the playing cards, on the right. We also have quiz, this is bottom left. This is available on our website. It’s very playful. We organize different events at kindergartens and Nurserygarten schools. They read books and pamphlets to have them fully understand what we mean by disaster prevention.

I’ve talked about the disaster prevention. Now, let me go to another aspect, the support given to the areas that has been afflicted, stricken, by disasters. When once the disaster occurs that will change their livelihood of our members. Recovery and reconstruction is time consuming, takes many months and years, but we are providing support, so they can restart their life as quickly as possible and shorten the recovery period. The path for rehabilitation recovery reconstruction also differs according to the areas and the need may also differ according to the disasters. We don’t want the one way support or something that we impose upon. We try to listen and understand the needs, first, of these disaster strict area, before we start to provide support and help. This means we will need to make sure that people always remember the past experiences, the past disasters.

Past disasters should never be forgotten. One area is in Miyagi. This is forestation and go alongside the coast to plant trees again. If you have forest alongside the cost, they can mitigate the disaster once there’s a disaster. In the center, there are people still living in temporary houses. We install flower beds together with the residents, so that they can have some sort of sense of respite or some joy in their day to day life. We try to be creative and try to engage in many activities, but we alone cannot do it, so we work in partnership with different organizations, including NPOs and citizens organizations.

Let me show some activities which may distinctive to our organization. This is the smile mutual aid, fire insurance for eco friendly house. We have the Kokumin Kyosai Co-op on top and you see the Kokumin Kyosai Co-op members. Let me explain the mechanism. Once the house of the members are damaged by disasters of fires we provide insurance. Now, if the house that was damaged was an eco friendly house with the solar system then the premiums would be discounted when they apply for the insurance coverage. We provide so-called Echo Discount, so that we can promote installation of many eco-friendly equipment, so that we can collectively try to mitigate the impacts of disaster.

Another distinctive feature is on the right hand side. Fire insurance for eco-friendly house, depending upon the policies we set up pool of money to be donated to the environmental organizations, so that we can strengthen the eco-friendly or environmental preservation activities. We to create a virtuous circulation. This has been started since 2008, so we have the experience of 13 years already, 93,000 cases, and 166.4 million yen was donate as a result of this. This is the pool of funds coming from the policies in force. We want to further expand this in the future. We want to expand this, not only to the environmental preservation, but the children’s activities facilitating disaster prevent and mitigation.

I have tried to explain what we have done. Now, let me go to the next subject and introduce what we are doing right now.  This is the upcoming disaster prevention and mitigation project. We would like to always be evolving and advancing. The 10 years since the Great East Earthquake, 10 years from the mitigate, five years from Kumamoto earthquake, and 25 years from the Kobe Great Fire, so month then year. We are still prone to many earthquakes in that region, as well, those risks are not gone. Based on the experience we’d like to further efforts to be more effective in disaster prevention and mitigation. We have started this since 2013. Let me introduce some of our activities. Excuse, this has been started from March of 2021.

Now on the March 11th, 2021, this is a 10 years anniversary of the Great East Japan earthquake. Together with the domestic broadcasting company we have put together a special feature TV program focusing on disasters. You never know when the disasters occur, you may be at home, you may be on the streets. It is not predictable. Given the nature of such a disaster, we would like to update the knowledges, and information, and understanding of the people, so for awareness, we use the TV broadcasting program in partnership with TV station.

On the left, we have used a quiz. When you are kitchen and when the earthquake occurs what would you do first? That was the first question we asked. Many said, “Put off the fire, turn off the stove or the range,” because in Kanto earthquake many years ago there were many fires taking away the lives of the many, so they’ve always thought that putting off the fire is a priority, but the household equipment has been well designed, so when there is a big shake they stop automatically. Putting off the fire is no longer necessary. Rather putting off your fire yourselves it is now recommended that you should try to evacuate and find a safe place. The information and the situation surrounding the disaster is updated day after day, but it’s very difficult for the citizens to come to learn about this. That is why we have organized such a TV program. 2.8% of rating, 5.9 million households are believed have watched this TV and we have used this social message and many people said this has proved very useful. We believe that we played a little role in trying to disseminate helpful information to the people at large.

The next slide illustrates about the next effort. We work together with the municipalities and various organizations for education purposes, awareness purposes. [foreign language 00:25:50]. If project in Shibuya, we are headquartered in Shibuya Tokyo, therefore, Shibuya is a neighbor. In the local area, together with different organizations and municipalities, we conducted an awareness campaign Shibuya, Shibuya Ward. The citizens is 240,000, but during the day for work and for pleasure shopping many people come. During the day, it is a city of 2 million to 3 million people, so the traffic or the density of people during the daytime is so high. If there’s a disaster occurring during the day it is bound to cause confusion and, unfortunately, concrete damages. Given the situation we try to educate and enhance the awareness of the people.

March to May was the first phase. What did we do? If you look at the bottom left, it’s tiny, I’m sorry. It’s the Plaza in front of Shibuya Station a sign board, big board, 10 meters or more of width, we talk about the project. Cute character, we use this so that we can attract the attention to people. If you look the circles in the center, we talk about the timing of the disaster that happened in the past. This is to let them know that disasters can occur any time during around the clock, in the morning, in the middle of the night, or the daytime, so we like to have them understand it can happen any time.

Since, at different corners we sent out messages. You have four photographs on the right, on the bottom top. Those come to Shibuya for pleasure, when you experience disaster the evacuation destination is your Yoyogi Park. They tell how much is Yoyogi Park away. It will talk about from 452 meters, there’ll be a Yoyogi Park where you’ll be advised to evacuate and seek safety in a time of disaster. People coming from outside the Yoyogi area will not know this, so for one time, visitors will let them know how far or how close the park is. Also, in the restaurants and areas, when they are dining you may experience a sudden earthquake, so we try to talk about what if and suggest what you might do. Youngsters find should be a very interesting. We asked the youngsters, are you prepared? We ask questions to seek how prepared they are for sudden earthquakes or disasters. Also, we have stores where you can buy the disaster preventive or mitigation goods. We work in partnership with retail stores.

The objective of these activities are twofold. First, is we active. In Shibuya we would like to be a contributor to the local community. We like to let them know that we are there. We like to be visible. Shibuya is known for a town of creators and innovations, so together with those people who come to Shibuya, we like to put together a disaster mitigation and prevention model, which we can share eventually to the entire Japanese society. This will be a medium term effort and we want to organize different events of this nature in the future as well.

This is the on the web. When you put in your address we have the disaster risk awareness map. You can identify the risks that you may be exposed to landslides or the like. We talk about soft face subsurface soil condition. This is a pamphlet, a guidebook, for members who will be affected by disasters, so that we can mitigate the damage. We have diversity of ideas here for if… It is not one time effort, we believe that this is an activity that require midterm activities, so we would like to verify and look back what we have achieved so far and build on that experience and continue activities.

Lastly, I would like to introduce this. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, but ICMIF/UNDRR has has put together a study report and our activities were introduced in this study report. Our activities focusing on human relationship was introduced. If the mutual aid and human relationship will help to mitigate the disaster consequences, so this one effort of our has been introduced in this ICMF/UNDRR study report and awareness campaign for children had also been discussed here.

Companies that are doing well in SDGs were chosen and there was a book about those premium excellent companies. This was published in February. They talk about organizations and companies who are active in SDGs, 17 were selected to be more active and we were one of them. Our efforts in disaster mitigation prevention have been recognized and also cooperative model and mutual aid model has been recognized and introduced from the perspective of SDGs. If you have not seen it before, I would like to encourage you to pick up this book and go through the pages. It’s very helpful in educational. I think in the of SDGs the role of cooperatives is significant they expect it to do most for SDGs. We have the SDGs declaration of actions. We have to strengthen activities, so that we can live up to the expectations of the members, and society, and the world. For that we seek for your father corporation, support, and understanding and foremost, thank you very much for being such an excellent listener and patient listener. Thank you very much.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):
Sakai-san, thank you very much.

In your presentation, you talked about awareness raising, educational activities, and in order to make it successful what have been your challenges or difficulties? Can you introduce that for us?

Ken Sakai:
Yes. Thank you very much. What I’m introducing today, it’s not that I’m per directly involved in all these activities. Rather, our staff are engaged all over Japan, so I don’t know the details of every, but it is involving many people. That means there needs to be coordination and sharing of the objective. I believe that to be very important. Also, in going forward with these efforts what’s most important is disaster prevention and mitigation. Well, we are very afraid of these disasters.

Just saying we should engage in them is not going to accelerate things, so we’ve just shown you some examples today. It depends on your lifestyle, your family structure, what you need to prepare will differ depending on such aspects. What is important is that you want to engage in disaster prevention or mitigation activities. How can we create an environment where you proactively want to engage in them? That means that you should be taking your own initiative and that means that it’s a product of a difficult task, but good communication. I’m hoping that our activities will be well received by members.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you very much. Very interesting presentation. I’d like to send the speaker for his contribution, so thank you very much, sir. Mr. Sakai, for your contribution. Now, I’m going to switch to English.

So we are moving to the second presentation, Kumar Shailabh Executive Director of up Uplift Mutuals in India is going to make a presentation titled People First, how Uplift Mutual is building for what people need.

Kumar Shailabh:

Thank you for giving us this opportunity to present to such a great audience. My name is commercial lab and I represent an organization called Uplift Mutuals. We are a health micro insurance organization working in the field of providing mutual insurance to low income households. And we have been doing this for about 18 years now. And when ICMIF asked us to present about what is done as disaster mitigation and the SDGs, we felt that we needed to tell our story because in India, health can be a disaster in itself. Natural disasters happen all the time, but health itself is a disaster. And I’ll tell you how. So I’ll begin my presentation. Thank you everyone for your patience.

If you look at what is happening in India, and this is something that has been the story for almost last two decades, by the time this presentation, this webinar will be over, roughly 7,000 Indians would have fallen below poverty line because of health expenses. 60 million people in India fall into poverty because of health expenses. And that’s a manmade disaster, whatever you want to call it, but it is one of the most difficult things we have in this country. What happens in health expenses is not the hospital expenses only. So if you look at all the overall health expense in India, you will find that 60 to 70% of this expense is on medicines, diagnostics, outpatient care, going to the doctor, not hospitalization. Whereas when you look at the health insurance products in India, they cover only hospitalization. So what people need and what is available in the market are two different things. Trust in commercial insurance is very low because of past experiences in claims, claims have been rejected. People do not know why they’re rejected.

There is a very fine print written in the insurance policy and for the poor, for the low income household, giving money for something that may or may not happen is still a very vague idea. So trust is very low. If you look at India, the government schemes are the ones that are actually providing any protection right now to the poor. So we have this scheme that is actually working on the ground, which is covering the basic, the most poor people in India, which is about 300 to 400 million people. Let me remind you, India is a country of 1.37 billion people and commercial insurance covers the top 10, 15% population while government insurance covers the low most 25% population. So if you look at the top and the bottom, there is a huge middle, which we call the missing middle about 5 to 700 million people who still don’t or can’t buy health insurance for various reasons, low trust, bad experience.

And most of this is out of pocket, which remains one of the reasons why India, even if people earn a lot, one incident of health will bring them down to poverty. So this is the background in which we are operating, who are we? So we are one of the pioneers of mutual health in India. You should know that in India, mutual health is not known. It is not regulated. And there is only one model where there are private stock holding companies that can provide insurance. So we are one of the, what should I say? First organizations in the country, along with our partners foundation, who are all members who have built this model from bottoms up. We have started a movement where people should come together and build their own insurance. We are one of the few mutuals in India to survive.

There were about 50, 55 schemes that were started 20 years back, but due to various reasons, all of them have collapsed. We remain one of the three organizations still to do mutuals in India. And our model is where women lead the insurance design and delivery. It’s a very women lead model, whether it is designing the product, what kind of product you want, what kind of services you want, what is the actual need coming from the households is something that we sit with women, whether they are in the slums or villages of India, we sit with them and we discuss with them. And then we design it. The interesting part is that when it comes to claims, these women who actually decide on these claims, they are trained by us on understanding how risk management works on how a claim decision should be done.

So while the normal insurance company, you file a claim, there is an underwriter who checks the claim. The final decision is always with this member-led committee, which is comprising of women. With the photograph that you see behind is actually of a meeting where women are deciding to pay the claims. What we have realized is that, as I said earlier, the focus in health insurance in India is more about what happens when you go to the hospital, whereas if you look at the expenses, it happens outside the hospital. So medicines, drugs, diagnostics, going to the doctor, going to the GP, general practitioner, things like that. This is where most of our expenses happen. And we realize that if we don’t look at this design, if we don’t design as to what people need, this will follow the same trajectory that commercial insurance follows.

So I’ll talk about the various services that we have built as part of the product. And you will see why we say people first, because the entire design is to make sure that people don’t fall ill in the first place. So, insurance is typically you fall ill, you go to the hospital, you file a claim. Our model is different. Our model is let’s do everything possible to not fall ill in the first place. Let’s do everything that if you fall ill, you get the right treatment at the right cost. What do we have? We work with the most very income households. We have about 400,000 plus members across slums and villages in three states of India, [foreign language 00:14:02]. These are all western states. And we are right now working on a digital mutual where we have had now a series of learning for the last so many years.

We are now using that learning to build a digital platform where we can offer the platform to different communities to set up their own mutual. And as I said, we are a not for profit. We are also working to see that mutuals gets regulated. So this is a brief background on what we do.

So when I say people first, what is our design principle? Where is the focus on delivery that I’m talking about? And how does it relate to disaster management and SDG is something that I’ll discuss later. So I’ll tell you a very small story that happened in the beginning when we were starting, when we had not even started Uplift. The question was one of our community members in the slums, a lady, had to go through a medical emergency. And we took her to a hospital, tried to raise funds for her treatment. And she got the treatment. But after some days she passed away and the doctors told us that we were late to bring that lady. That was kind of a shock to a lot of us because many of us had contributed in her treatment cost. And everybody was this could happen to anybody. So why don’t we do something? And mind you, health insurance is not something that people wake up one day and say, oh, I want this. And for those populations where earning a livelihood on a daily basis is a challenge, this is all together a different idea.

We got an insurance company, a commercial insurance company to come and talk to these women that we were working in the slums in 2004. And this gentleman comes with his laptop, showcases one of the mediclaim products, which is the standard health insurance product in India, and talks about the product and then asks the women if they have any questions, they should ask him. Now, one of our elderly members, she gets up and she says, I understand all this and that when I fall ill, you will give me this, you’ll give me that. What happens to my money when I don’t fall ill? Now you have to remember these women are run on very small budgets their households. So giving something, giving money upfront for something that may or may not happen is a very big question to them.

And it’s a question of value for money. They are always looking for value for money. And the insurance guy was very clear. He was like, look, when you fall ill, you get 10 times off what you have paid. That is your profit. Similarly, when you don’t fall ill, your premium becomes my profit. Now this lady, not very educated, she thinks for a second. And then she says, which means I have no interest in being healthy because when I am healthy, you are making money. That was kind of a catalyst for us to, should we go with the commercial model or not? And then we started looking into what is really happening on ground. And we found out that leave insurance apart access to care itself is a very big thing in the urban and rural parts of India, because we have a very segregated medical system.

It’s not very well organized. It’s not very well standardized. Things are happening of late, but we still have a very, very disparate medical system. So for the same treatment, you can find at least five different price points. And we saw that the poor always ends up being the most because they don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to negotiate. They don’t know how to talk to the doctor. It’s imaginary, it’s a massive problem for them. And it is now proven that the poor pay almost 5 to 10 times more than the reach for accessing the same healthcare. So when we realized that, this entire thing is so complicated and the typical commercial health insurance model is not going to work. We started to look into the design factor. And what I’m going to take you through is these discussions that we have had with communities.

The picture behind this slide is actual picture of where we are talking to community women in communities in Rajasthan, west of India. And we try to understand, what do people actually need to access healthcare? What will they pay and why will they pay? Paying for something as I said, that may or may not happen is something that does not make sense to them and will it be inclusive? So we came out with these questions, talking to the communities and then realized that commercial health insurance has problems in design. And we need to really look into it. One was the fact where you had three parties, the insurance company, the customer, and the hospital. And we realized that all three want to take advantage of the other. And in doing that, the program, the product itself becomes really bad.

So what we did was we chose the mutual model saying that the insurer and the insured should be one, because there are already three parties. It’s highly complex, let’s make the insurer and the insured one. Take the mutual model and negotiate with hospitals. That was one. Second we realized was most of the health insurance product is focused on hospitalization, which means do something after you have fallen ill. We were like, if this continued, if this kind of system continued, there will never be enough money to pay for any claim because people will constantly fall ill, so why not look at prevention? And that is where we found the sweet spot, I would say, where we understood that if we provide certain health services, they not only work as gatekeepers for health reasons, but also provide value for money.

And the other thing that we decided when we were doing this was health insurance typically charges different premiums for different ages. And after 60, 65 in India, you cannot buy health insurance in India. And we felt that that was not the right thing. As a mutual, we should look at everybody. So we came out with a product, which talks about a different design. And to tell you what we did in the health services part, what we did on our part was we set up outpatient care where a doctor goes to the slum, goes to the villages and provides our member care on the spot. Now you would think that this is such a simple thing. Yes, it is. But doctors going to the slums and working is not very often seen in India. The second thing is that when the doctor go and work in the slums and villages, people build trust over the insurance, they see for themselves that there is somebody to take care of themselves.

And the whole idea of providing a gatekeeping service. So let me tell you that out of 10 diseases in India, it can be solved if you catch them early. If people come to doctor early in their illness, you can actually treat them. What happens with poor people is that they don’t have the money to go anywhere. They take the disease on their body till they really fall in and then they’re hospitalized. So typically poor people more ill primarily also because they don’t seek early treatment. They don’t have the money, or they don’t have the access to early care. And this is what we realized was going to be a game changer for us because we realized that this works both ways. For the mutual, it reduces the risk and for the member it gives value for money.

Far more than hospitalization can give. To give you an example, in commercial insurance, we have out of thousand, let’s say 5% people accessing claims. In uplift, we have 2% people accessing claims, but over 60% people accessing health services. So the value for money is extremely high in the uplift model. So we set up this outpatient care. Then we also realized that the doctors cannot be there every time. So we set up a 24/7 medical health line, again, run by a doctor so that the people can call the doctor anytime.

This is one of the most used service. And when COVID struck this time, this was the service that actually helped our members access care when there was no medical care available, except for COVID. We also provide navigation support. As I said, people don’t know where to go. So what we have done is we have worked with hospitals, clinics, different types of doctors to set up a network where we can tell our members that if you are sick, you go to this doctor, he will provide you with good quality, good care at good price. And we also for the last four years working to bring medicines because medicines are one of the biggest reasons why out of pocket expense is very high. So we have set up a not for profit pharmacy, where we are providing with medicines.

So as I said, being a mutual, and mutuals need no introduction to this audience, but just to tell you how we do it, the claims in this model are decided by women. This is since 2004. We used to sit once a month like this, the women that you’re seeing, they sit together and they take the decision on the claims. Once the claim started increasing, we then elected representatives like you do in parliament. And these representatives would settle the claims.

Now, what we do differently also is that every member has access to the performance data or the mutual. So how many people are there, how much money is collected, how much money has gone into claims? This is now available at the click of a button. Earlier we used to do this once a month in the meetings, but now with our app, it is available on the app. And we every year do the AGM where we discuss the product experience for this year, for the year that has gone by, and also see if we can improve the product. So this is something that is unique in India. This happens world over, but this is unique in India where members learn their own health insurance details.

As I said, we always keep our ears to the ground. And what we have seen in the past is that the more you listen to people, the better the product becomes, the better the product works. So earlier we used to settle claims in 30 days because we had once a month meeting where people would get together and decide on the claims. Then we had the representatives also, but that also met once a month. And then we realized after 10 years in 2017, that now 70 to 80% of our claims go by the rule box, by the product rules. So we are holding back those many claims for some claims which are not clean enough. So we decided to do an experiment of making the process faster. We brought the claims turnaround time from 30 to 15 days in 2018, then by 2019 we brought it down to seven days.

And I’m very happy to tell you that for the last one and a half years, we have been settling our claims in two years. This is thanks to the app. The app you can access your entire policy. This is in local language. You can file a claim. You can register for the different health services that we have. You can also vote. So Uplift has been differentiating itself from the beginning because we were one of the pioneers in mutual health insurance software. We have one of the most cutting edge softwares in the world where the entire management is available through a software. And now with the member app, the members can actually access all the data and talk to us directly.

So where are we now? So we have had a lot of problems because health insurance is not a widely accepted product. It takes time to build this with communities. It takes time to build trust. It takes time to build the services because as I said, the medical services in India are not that up to mark. We have islands of great medical care, but this is not uniformly available and especially not available to the poor. So it has been quite a challenging journey for us where it has taken us quite some design changes, quite some work with communities to build this. But now we are looking to scale this to millions, and we tried two years back with support, scaling this up, but we are not successful because we did not have reinsurance access, but we are now looking at a digital platform as a way of scaling this model up throughout India.

And also very recently, we have started talking to the insurance regulators where we have presented Uplifts case and discussions are on. Coming to another product that we have, two years back, we realized that while we are working with adults, if you really want to bring the mutual idea to millions of Indians, you really need to work with children. And that’s where this idea of school be well was born. This is a school mutual where we work with different schools, where children from very low economic backgrounds come to study, and we cover them through a mutual product. So very early on life, they experience what a mutual product looks like. So they get access to all the Uplift services. These kids are holding the helpline number right now, where they can talk to a doctor directly. And this has been going on really well. This is right now completely a funded program.

This is not based on premiums. This is something that we have thought that this should be funded for sometime before it scales up, because we have about a hundred million children in India who do not have access to this kind of services. So that’s one thing that we are doing in the last two years. And coming back to the discussion on disasters, COVID really made life very difficult for us in India, as anywhere else in the world but Pune and Mumbai, were the two cities which were very badly hit, we are one of the worst hit cities in the world.

And what has happened in the past is that in the last one and a half years, because of COVID and COVID induced lockdowns, people have lost their livelihoods. They don’t have money to eat because there is no work available. Most of these small factories have shut down because they could not stay logged down for long. And there is a new level of poverty that has been created because of COVID. And what we saw was on the field, our members could not pay the premium last year or this year.

Our members could not pay the premium last year or this year, because they don’t have the money, but they needed the services. And there was this new category of poor people being created, who earlier were never poor, but because of loss of jobs for more than six months, they have just finished their savings and things like that. So we realized that these people need care and medicines, but they don’t have the money to buy it. And it’s been extremely difficult and normal doctors are not available in the slums or in the cities because for fear of COVID, nobody’s organizing physical OPDs and the Telecon circulation model is mostly used by the rich. So we thought that it was our duty when such a disaster struck that we should provide care and I’m happy to tell you we are doing what we can do little because we remain a not-for-profit.

We have set up five medical vans, two in Pune, three in Mumbai, and each van is providing about 100 people every day with free OPD care and medicines. And every month, one vehicle is doing about 5,000 OPDs. So that’s something that we have realized is of massive use to people. We are seeing people lining up. And as I said, most of these people did not need free care, but because of COVID, they just don’t have the money. Many people have stopped their diabetes and blood pressure medications. Many elderly have stopped going to the doctor because they don’t even have, let’s say, $2 to go to a doctor and pay the fees. So it’s extremely difficult right now for the last six months and that’s where we are providing these services.

What we also realized was that there is one section of the population called truck drivers who are actually transporting oxygen and essential across the country, but nobody gives them any protection. So we are in fact, right now in the process of designing a product for them, where we will be offering about 5,000 truck drivers, free COVID insurance. We are raising money for this right now to do this. The other thing we also are doing in the last two weeks, is that after a lot of requests coming from our members that they don’t want charity, when we help them, they say, “this is good, but this won’t last” and if we can help them with finding jobs or setting up their livelihoods. So we are now in the process of going out to different donors, investors,, to raise finance, low interest credit for them so that these people can restart their livelihoods. That’s something that we are working on.

These are some of the very basic pictures of the relief work we are doing. These are OPDs, which are being conducted in the slums with our doctors. We are distributing grains. We are working with truck drivers very closely right now. Yeah, and that’s it. That’s all from my side. You can learn more about us on Facebook and on our website. Thank you. I’m happy to take questions.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you very much, Kumar, so it’s a very interesting story. We have two questions from audience.

Kumar Shailabh:

Thank you for the question. That’s a very good question. We, when you say social welfare for, because we are working with the poor, this is part of the design. This is not something that we do separately. Please understand that we work with the poorest of the population in India. You know, they earn roughly anywhere between two to $6 a day. And so a lot of work that you are seeing that we do are part of our routine design. Yes, there is no government support as of now, because government has its own model of providing social welfare support. So no we don’t work with the government as of now. And the challenges that are is one, because we are not for profit ourselves. We don’t have enough resources to, to execute this. So like when COVID struck, we actually went about raising funds so that, you know, we can provide these medical van services, provide the medicines for free so that those challenges remain.

And the biggest challenge is that we cannot operate as a for-profit in India because we are not regulated. And this, you know, really pulls us down because we cannot scale the product the way commercial insurance can do in India. The product is needed by people, but the regulation is regulation is something that needs to change for that.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Okay. Thank you, Kamal, thank you. Another question is: you are using apps so you have shorten the claims settlement to 2 days. But what if people cannot use apps? Do you still allow those people to go through the paper process? Do you know how much those clients represent in term of percentage?

Kumar Shailabh:

That’s again, a very, very intelligent question. Thank you for that. So you have to remember that in India, the mobile penetration is far higher than, you know, other countries. Our internet is one of the cheapest in the world in the last two years. And that’s where, when we decided to build the app, otherwise we could have built the app 10 years back also, but it was not feasible. So in 2018, we did a survey with our members and found out that almost 60% of our members have smartphones. And that’s where we decided to build the app. So that’s point number one. Yes. You can file very well, a physical claim. You can file a paper claim. You, you can call our service staff and they will come and collect it from your house. Or you can come to the office and you can submit that. In the tribal areas of India, where we work in Rajasthan, it’s still not, it’s still not digital because we don’t have internet services over there, very small ones, but wherever it is possible, we are building this because this really makes the process very fast.

So to your question, it does not matter whether you have an app or not, the app only makes it faster. You can file a claim. And even if you file physically a claim, we use the same speed to disperse. So the app only makes the user easy access to, you know, file a claim so they can use open the app, pick the pictures of the documents and send it to us, whereas they will have to physically come or physically give us the papers. But the processing time is still the same. We do it into us, not two days. This is after a one and a half years that we have achieved this, you know, process clarity. And for post games that do not fit in the toolbox, we still have a meeting once a month where let’s say out of a hundred claims 95 games are saturated by the fast process, but five claims, if they are not clear, if there is some problem in them, they go to the claims committee. So that process still exists. Thank you.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you very much, Kamal. So actually we have another question but we are running out of time so Sarah is waiting. So maybe after the start of the presentation, if we have a time, I will pick up these kinds of questions. Anyway. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. So, so we are moving to the final present presentation. So the final presentation will be by Sarah McCauley General Manager, Social impact. He’s going to make a presentation title, great things safer, sustainable and connected community.

Sarah McCauley:

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I’m really pleased to be here today to talk to you about our vision around creating a safer, sustainable and connected communities. I just wanted to start by giving you a little bit of context, just for those of you don’t know about RAC and also about, about Perth in Western Australia, generally. So RAC is a purpose-led member organization, and we’ve been part of the WA or the Western Australian community for 116 years. So as you can see on the slide there, WA is quite a significant proportion of Australia. There’s actually 2.6 million people live in WA, and it’s a very vast state, but about 80% of the population actually live within the Perth metropolitan area. So we’re quite Metro centric as a state. And really since our foundation back in 1905, our members and Western Australians are really helped shape and guide our paths.

We originally formed when a group of motoring enthusiasts came together to advocate and champion for the rights of motor vehicles and drivers when the car first came to WA. And since then, I suppose we’ve diversified as an organization. So we now offer a broad range of member based products and services. So roadside assistance, insurance, auto services, and batteries across those sort of more train and mobility space. But then also we have parks and resorts, for example, and we provide security and home services to quite a diverse range of member offerings and being, being a mutual a member-based organization. We don’t have any shareholders. So we reinvest our profits for the better of Western Australia. And we do that through our social and community impact activities, which I’m going to talk to you about today. But really we work in partnership with all levels of government, with industry, with our members and with all Western Australians to progress these activities and to champion change for the better. And I should also say that we have approximately 1.2 million members in Western Australia. So that’s a significant proportion of the population in the households in Western Australia.

So last year we introduced a new organization, wide purpose, vision, and mission. So this applies not only to our community social and community impact activities, but more broadly across our operational activities. And our vision is essentially our why, why we exist, what we’re here to do for our members and with our members. And our vision is really for, in terms of what we want to see the future look like. And so, as you can see on the slide there, and we have a very clear purpose around being the driving force for a better Western Australia. And the vision that really guides us around achieving that purpose is for a safer, sustainable and connected future for Western Australians. We want to see that in 2030. So this is really, I suppose, what we stand for as an organization, what we act on, and also how we measure, understand that impact on the community. I’m just going to show you a short video that really talks to our purpose and vision for this place.

[VIDEO]

Why didn’t you get out of bed this morning? Go on, ask yourself why. Most of you were probably thinking it was your alarm or the sunshine through your window, but I want to know why you came to work. What motivated you? At RAC, we’re embracing our why, why we exist as an organization, why we do what we do and why we get out of bed every morning. We up the driving force for a better WA. Together we can help create a safer, sustainable, connected future for all Western Australians. Let’s look forward to 2030. If we achieve out why our community will be safer as we move around our state. Our roads and roadsides will be improved. There’ll be a reduction in car dependency and human drivers. New technology and safety features in vehicles will be protecting us. And a greater sense of responsibility will be adopted by road users.

This will dramatically reduce the number of Western Australians being killed or more injured on our roads. We’ll make better choices about how we move around so that will be more sustainable. Places made for cars will have turned into places for people. Our urban areas will be greener and more attractive. Less cars and a high percentage of low and zero emission vehicles means that air will be cleaner and healthier, and importantly will help preserve our environment for future generations. And lastly, we’ll feel more connected to each other. And our communities will be thriving. Towns and cities will be flourishing because design puts humans first. Western Australians will enjoy a well-connected, affordable public transport system. There’ll be extensive cycle paths and safe and interesting pedestrian networks. This will bring people together more often, encouraging them to walk around their neighborhoods, socialize and connect. Together with our members we’ll make our state better for all Western Australians. This, after all, is our purpose and why we do what we do. We are the driving force for a better WA.

So hopefully you get the sound of that, but the next slides that I go through will really talk to that purpose and vision and some of the initiatives that we’ve been doing to deliver on that so far. So I just want to do, introduce this slide. This really sets the context, I suppose, around how we are trying to understand the impact of our social and community impact activities. So we don’t want to just do activity for activity sake. We actually really want to have a clear outcome or a clear goal that we’re trying to achieve. And so, as we progress towards our vision, we’ve adopted what we refer to as the social impact metric. And this helps as I say, to keep our activities quite focused. So that the center of the circle that you can see our purpose and then outside of it, you can see our three impact areas.

So the safe, sustainable, and connected. The sort of medium blue around that is the key theme. So they’re the key things that we’re trying to influence through advocacy activities. And then the outer circles there in the light blue, the yellow and the orange are really, I suppose, our metrics. So these are quite, these are externally focused metrics and they help us to monitor what’s happening in the changing environment around us and to better plan and react and respond to those things, to try and influence positive outcomes. So as you see there under our safe pillar, our focus is on having the rate of people killed and seriously injured on our roads within the next five years. That’s a very ambitious target. When we look back over the last decade, the reduction achieved was around 36%. So that is very ambitious. We also have a focus on reducing the harmful vehicle emissions, so NOx and its impacts on health.

That’s a proxy, I suppose, for other harmful pollutants as well, such as particulate matter. And also within the connected space, we’re really trying to influence transport affordability. So that’s in relation to public and private transport and also the amount that people are driving per capita and how connected they feel across and within their communities. So if just added on the slide there, the relevant or related SDGs that we’re essentially aligning with, and we’ve got a little way to go still to fully embed those, but we are actively trying to contribute directly towards those goals through activities. So I’m just going to go through each of the pillars now in turn, give you a bit of a feel for what it’s about, what we’re trying to do. And then some of the key initiatives that we’ve been delivering recently. So we want to stop needless deaths and serious injuries that are occurring on our road, far, too many people being killed and seriously injured.

And that has a rippling effect through communities. It’s not just the individuals that are involved in the crash, but local communities, particularly in our regional areas where the communities are very connected or yeah, the community feel was very strong. They really do feel it. So as I mentioned, we’ve set these ambitious targets that we want to work towards achieving, and that really helps to guide our activities and focus on things that are really going to make an impact in terms of making our roads safer and not just our roads. So I should say that we now with social and community impact activities, we seek to align them with the widely recognized safe systems approach. So as some of you may know, that is really an approach that’s been adopted, which focuses on trying to reduce the likelihood of a crash occurring in the first place. But when a crash does occur, it seeks to reduce the severity of the crash.

And there are sort of called components or cornerstones to that approach, which are safer road users, safe roads and roadsides, safe vehicles, safe speeds, and post-crash care. So our activities do try to take that sort of holistic approach where we can, but I’m just going to touch on a couple of the activities that we’ve been delivering recently to give you a feel of some of the things that we’ve been doing. Oh, sorry. I should also say, I just wanted to frame it in the context for you as well. So when I say far too many people being killed and seriously injured, almost five people are killed and seriously injured every day on WOA roads. And in 2020 alone, we had 156 people killed on our roads and a further 1500 was seriously injured.

And WA’s fatality rate – We used to be one of the best in the country and now we actually find ourselves amongst the worst. And one of the key challenges for us is regional areas in Western Australia. And I’ll talk to some of these issues in a minute, but I’m actually 65% of fatalities that occur in Western Australia are actually occurring on our regional roads and only 20% of the population lives in those areas. And we find that the majority of those crashes are single vehicle run off the road and also head on crashes as well, where people are driving long distances in regional areas. Fatigue and other factors can play a role.

So this is the elephant in the Wheatbelt. This is one of the initiatives that we launched a couple of years ago. So back in 2015, and at that time, the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia was one of the worst road safety performance. And there was a lot of myths and misconceptions about what was driving that road, that port road safety record, and a lot of the local people thought that it was tourists driving through the region that weren’t familiar with regional roads that were having crashes. But actually the stats were telling us that it was local people on local roads. And as I mentioned, a lot of that while some of it was behavioral to do is not wearing seatbelts, for instance. There were a range of other factors and as I mentioned, regional runoff road at the single vehicle, so fatigue related was a key driver.

So we created this elephant in the Wheatbelt and we actually produce this from wrecks of crashed cars. So, you know, all of the parts that you can see on the elephant, and this was a life-size African elephant, are all from crash vehicles. And we put this elephant out in regional towns within the Wheatbelt region, and we didn’t market it as RSE. We just put it there. And the intent was to start the conversation about what is this giant elephant. And then once we started seeing some activity in social media, we started to engage in the discussion and actually explained to people what this elephant represented and that we were trying to address an issue that really wasn’t being given enough attention. And it was a really powerful campaign. And we saw a lot of local people actually embrace it and develop their own activities around it, to engage their communities around road safety issues. So it was a really powerful tool to actually inspire community led action as well.

The regional road safety package is another one of our key priorities. So this is actually a state government proposed project, but there was a lack of traction and funding for it back when we started advocating for it in 2019. And I’ll, I’ll talk a little bit more about the program on the next slide, but essentially it’s looking at introducing low-cost, quick-win changes to the road environment to address some of those issues I mentioned earlier, such as the run offroad crashes. So as you can see on that picture there, the, the road shoulders, while these are quite good in that they’re quite wide and there isn’t too many obstacles immediately adjacent to the road. A lot of our regional roads do actually have trees right up against the road way. The hard shoulders are not sealed. And so when you do have an incident where you’re coming off the road, you don’t have a lot of time or good quality surfacing to actually correct yourself and get back onto the road.

And that’s a contributing factor to a lot of those runoff road crashes. As I say, when fatigue’s involved people are often drifting off the road and they don’t realize they’ve done it until it’s too late and they don’t have time to correct their paths. So this program was, as I said, developed by the state government, and it looks at treating 17,000 kilometers of our regional road network, which is a huge proportion of the state road network. And some modeling that the state government had done on this program actually showed that we would prevent, oh, say if more than 1,200 lives and serious injuries from this program. So reduced regional road trauma by 60%. And the program actually only costs 900 million, which is a very small proportion of the overall transport spend. In WA I think it was around 3%.

But for every dollar that would be spent on this program, $4 would be returned in terms of savings to the economy and through reduced road trauma. So at the moment road trauma and WA costs about the economy about 2.4 billion. So that kind of puts that into scale, but it’s a huge lifesaving program and there’s something we’ve been advocating for really strongly. And we’re really pleased that to date, we’ve been able to get about three quarters of the funding for the program. So implementation has actually started now, which will be fantastic to see when it’s in place and all the lives and serious injuries that are saved as a result.

Another problem that we have in a Metro area, so within Perth, is metropolitan intersections. So around one in two of all crashes occur at one of our 50,000 intersections. And in terms of the people dying and being seriously injured, it’s about 30% of all KSI so it is a significant problem for us. And to put that into the economic context, those crashes alone cost around $1.2 billion. So one of our other priorities is around a low cost metropolitan intersections program. So the state government already does some great work around what we call treating black spots – so locations where there are concentrations of crashes.

But a lot of those projects are quite expensive because they require a lot of civil works and in some cases they may require a great separation. But a lot of crashes are sort of disbursed across the network at the more minor intersections. And so this program that we’re advocating for is really trying to applying the, spend more broadly across the network, by doing a lower cost solutions. It’s not going to solve crashes at all intersections, but it just allows us to get, I suppose, more impact for our dollars because we can apply it more broadly across the network.

One of the other things that we’ve been doing in the safe space. So some of you may be familiar with our Intellibus trial and really throughout a trial, we’re trying to engage the community and also government in the discussion around what the future could look like with autonomous vehicles. And a lot of research says that around 90% of crashes, all the majority of crashes involve an element of human error. So when we talk about a future with autonomous vehicles, there’s the potential to make a fatality-free road environment, quite a possibility. So back in 2016, we started testing what we refer to as the Intellibus and the Intellibus runs along the South Perth Foreshore, so you can see the city of Perth in the background there. So it is within the central metropolitan area. And it runs on a road with other vehicles, with pedestrians, with cyclists, interacting and reacting in that sort of dynamic road environment.

And it’s actually, it was Australia’s first and longest running trial on public roads. So for those of you don’t know, the Intellibus is a level four autonomous vehicle, which means that it can perform all of the driving tasks within a certain or within a certain environment. So it’s mapped to the route that we run it on, and it’s also fully electric as well as it has that added benefit. And as you can see there, it is a shared vehicle as well. And so we’ve been trialing it, as I mentioned in that, along that route in south Perth, since 2016, but we’ve also taken it to regional locations as well, to give regional communities the chance to see and experience it. So we’ve, we had it in Busselton, which is just south of Perth. And then we had it in Geraldton last year, which is just north of Perth.

We also run what we call the imagine program, and this is a great engagement piece or education piece to get kids really passionate and excited about the future with this technology. So we run it for year five and six primary school students, and they come and have a ride on the Intellibus. They also visit the old mill, which is the location that we connect or the destination that we connect

Which is the location that we connect or the destination that we connect to with the service, but they also do other activities. So they do a coding for road safety exercise, and they do an exercise where they have to pitch a future mobility device to a client, and they get given a client persona, and they’re told what this client ideally wants from this service. And they design a service and make it out of recycled materials, and it’s a really engaging program, and it’s so great to see the children really excited about the possibilities of what this driverless future could look like.

And so today, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Intellibus, last week actually. And to date, we’ve had 23,000 passengers ride on it, and it’s traveled over 30,000 kilometers in autonomous mode. This has been a really great vehicle, not just… Excuse the pun. A vehicle for engaging our members in the community, but it’s also been a really powerful tool, one, to demonstrate the benefits of the technology and to give us a good understanding of what this technology could look like and how we could plan and prepare for this future. But we’ve taken the learnings from this trial and actually fed them into national reform pieces around the changes that are going to be required to make sure that we can safely transition to having autonomous vehicles operating on our roads in the future.

So it’s been a very power piece for multiple activities. My next impact area I’m going to talk to is the sustainable one. And the focus of this, as I mentioned earlier, is really around trying to reduce harmful vehicle emissions and the impact on the environment and the impact on health. And we primarily do this through activities to support the uptake of low and zero-emissions vehicles and also activities to support public and active transport use. So I won’t read what’s on the slide here, but I just wanted to give you a bit of context to I suppose, our emissions.

And as you can see there, on a per capita basis, our CO2 emissions. So that’s CO2 emissions broadly, not just within transport, are nearly four times the global average and the eighth highest in the world for route transport. And while we have lovely, clear, beautiful skies, and we don’t feel like air quality is an issue for us, the most recently available data which is from 2015 actually, shows that 2,500 Australian deaths were attributed to air pollution that year.

And that’s actually double the amount of people dying from road fatalities. So it is a real problem for us, and there are a number of factors that we seek to influence in that regard. So we have some really strong positions around trying to get the federal government to introduce mandatory CO2 emissions standard for new light vehicles.

So we’re one of the only countries in the developed world that doesn’t have that. And as you can see in the diagram there, our allowable sulfur content in petrol is significantly higher than a lot of other countries, like 15 times higher in some regards. So those are really real issues for us that we are trying to address throughout our advocacy, and currently, in terms of low and zero-emissions vehicles, we’ve had really slow uptake in Australia and in WA more specifically, so our military vehicles are currently under one percent of the vehicle fleet here, so we’ve got away to go.

So one of the things that we have done as an organization to try and help support uptake of low and zero-emissions vehicles was to launch Australia’s first electric highway back in 2015. At the time, we hardly had any electric vehicles in Western Australia, and we had a bit of a chicken and an egg situation. No one wanted to get electric vehicles because they were concerned there wasn’t enough infrastructure, but there wasn’t a lot of investment in infrastructure because we didn’t have a lot of electric vehicles.

And we knew that range anxiety was an issue for our members and for people considering buying electric vehicles more generally. So we decided to take a bit of a leadership role and introduce the electric highway as a way to I suppose, catalyze other investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. So we introduced it back in 2015, and we’ve developed the network a little bit since then. And you can see on the map there that essentially our network goes from Perth down to Augusta and the southwest of Western Australia. And it’s actually a distance of 620 kilometers, and we’ve got a combination of fast chargers and ultra-rapid chargers, and then there’s some slow ones at our parks and resorts.

And this has been really well-received by the community, and it’s actually really positive to see that late last year, the Australia… Sorry, the state government released an electric vehicle strategy, which actually had funding attached to it of 20 million to roll out a network to complement the electric highway. So it’s fantastic to see that we did this more than five years ago, and now we are seeing this action and uptake. And our electric vehicle uptake has increased significantly over that period, but proportionally, it’s still relatively low.

Just moving on to my last impact area, so Connected. I suppose the essence of this pillar is really around that we want WA to be a great place to live, work, and play. We want it to be easy and affordable for people to move around. And essentially, we want communities to be well-planned and have transport that connects people and places. So it connects people to the things that matter to their lives and their lifestyles.

We know through our own surveys that people who feel connected to and within their communities actually have a higher level of wellbeing than those who don’t. So this is really important from a general health perspective and wellness perspective as well. So I’m just going to touch on two things that we’re doing currently in this space. And these are really important initiatives because we can achieve a lot ourselves as an organization, but when we work in partnership, we can achieve much more.

And this Connecting Communities Fund that I’m going to talk to here is really a great example of how we’ve worked with a group called… or an organization called the Town Team Movement. And the Town Team Movement essentially helps to facilitate connections between local groups and local governments to drive action in local areas. And there are individual Town Teams across the states. So I think they’re up to maybe more than 50 now, and these Town Teams comprise local people, local businesses, and other landowners, who come together because they want to drive change in their local area.

And that change could be as simple as a community event, or it could be revitalizing a disused or underutilized area. Through our principal partnership with the Town Team Movement, we set up this Connecting Communities Fund, and we’ve been running it for a couple of years now. And each year, we have made around $50,000 available to support Town Team projects. And as I said, those projects could be creating meeting places, delivering local artwork, gardens, events, and a range of things that essentially help not just create, but build on the community identity and belonging. So just trying to create that nice community vibe where people feel involved in their local areas.

And these are some of the projects that were delivered last year that are on the slide here. But the Telstra Block Park is one example in a regional town where the area was an ugly, disused utility or services area in the heart of the town. And the community really wanted to make that into a space that people could enjoy and spend time, and we worked with that group and the local government to create a park in that area, which creates this fantastic place for people to come together.

And then the second initiative that I just wanted to touch on quickly was our Reconnect WA initiative. And again, this is a really great example of where we can deliver more with partners. So in response to COVID, we were very fortunate in WA. We were impacted by lockdowns quite early on, but because our government took action quite swiftly, our numbers obviously dropped down quite quickly and we’ve been able to enjoy, or get back to a relatively normal life within our day-to-day, within the state.

But one thing we did realize was a lot of these areas that have previously been quite vibrant and active were not seeing a lot of activity anymore. And as I said earlier, we know that people who feel connected and have opportunities within their local area to come together to interact, to enjoy local places have a high level of health and wellbeing. So we really wanted to work with local governments to look at how we could revitalize streets and public spaces to turn them into great places that people wanted to spend time. And so we set up this program, so we made a million dollars available last year.

And we ran an application process, and we invited local governments to deliver projects, or sorry, to nominate projects that would essentially talk to these objectives. So creating vibrant and active places for Western Australians to interact and reconnect, to inspire and empower local people and businesses to drive change in their local areas, and to lay the foundations for longer term changes. And we were overwhelmed by the response.

We actually had 40% of local governments across the whole of Western Australia apply. And we had 75 projects put forward for that first funding round, and we engaged our members in actually voting to help decide which projects that we were going to support. And we ended up identifying 10 projects or selecting 10 projects that we have been delivering the last year. Two of the earliest ones that we implemented are on the slide there. And I should say, when we put out the guidance around what we wanted these projects to essentially involve, and we did specify that we wanted them to be low-cost changes to the look and feel of streets and spaces.

So we were really looking for quick, low-cost infrastructure changes that would make a big impact to that area and that would have benefit in terms of our objectives. And so this Colours of Mandurah one is a really good example where it was a really inexpensive project and essentially, they engaged the community to submit ideas about what helps them connect with their local area. What do they love about living in their local area?

And they connected colors to each of these ideas, and they actually created this colored walkway to highlight an important pedestrian connection between two destinations in the city that a lot of people weren’t walking between, because they didn’t actually know this connection was there. So by simply engaging the community and creating this colorful walkway, they actually increased footfall quite significantly along that corridor. So encouraging those active transport trips and also supporting local businesses with increased activity.

And the other example there, the Meridian Pop-up Piazza, this was a really great example of a regional local government wanting to do something differently with their community. So they actually closed a section of their Main Street, so the busiest street in their town to create it into an inviting community space. And it included various different elements, and you can see the children there playing on a nature play space that was introduced. But there were parklets and other activities and things going on there as well to generate that activity.

And despite that being the main thoroughfare for cars through there, turning into that pedestrianized community space was actually really well-received by the community. And while that was only a quick pop-up demonstration of what could be achieved, it lasted for four months, it was so popular that the local governments actually looked at how they can embed some of the learnings from that into a longer term regeneration of that area, or revitalization of that area. So it was a really great, quick win, an example to demonstrate how something simple and a change like that could really impact that local community.

So I think that’s really it from me, but yeah, I just wanted to say that our activities as I said, we really strive to significantly reduce the number of people being killed and seriously injured on roads, reduce harmful vehicle emissions for health and cleaner air, and ensure communities are well-planned and transport connects people and places. And as I touched on earlier, those concepts and those design outcomes really do align with a lot of the SDG, the goals. So there’s a great alignment there.

And as we continue on our journey to 2030, we’ll be continuing to try and build more of that into our activities. So thank you very much for listening, and I hope I gave you some good insights into what we’re doing here in WA.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you very much, Sarah, for such a nice, wonderful presentation. We have several questions from audience. To audience, we have a little time to spend. So we start receiving your question from audience. So for Sarah, we have four questions written in Japanese. First question is: who created this figure and what were you careful of when you created this cercle/figure?

Sarah McCauley:

Great question. Yeah, so we have an advocacy strategy, which we used to call the Mobility Strategy, which was set by our governing bodies. So we’ve got a council and a club board that sit and provide that strategic guidance. And back in 2010, they set a mobility strategy, and that came to an end in 2019. Back in 2018, we were looking at what does our strategy need to be going forward, so we did a lot of research around the activities we focused on with that previous strategy, and what the future trends were looking like, and the things that we wanted to influence.

One thing we were very conscious of was that we have had a mobility focus, and while our businesses have broadened, so they’re not just about the car anymore and we offer a range of products and services, for our advocacy or as we’re calling it now, social and community impact, we really wanted to stay focused on mobility because that’s where we felt we could have the biggest influence, and because we want to be credible.

And we want to make sure that we are viewed as a credible advocate when are trying to influence government. And so it made a lot of sense for us to stay true to our mobility focus. So I suppose that was one consideration, but we wanted to look at what are the things that we want to influence, and where do we feel we could have influence? And then we identified those indicators and metrics around that. One thing I would say is it was challenging in that we would have to rely on publicly available information because those metrics are very externally focused.

So they are things that are happening in the external environment that we wanted to influence, but it’s very hard to obviously demonstrate our direct impact on those things. So I suppose we’ve got that metric where we look at the number of people being killed and seriously injured on roads, which we can definitely have an impact on, but because we don’t operate roads, for example, our impact is limited to influencing and also through being able to do demonstration projects, to demonstrate the benefits of doing things so that we try and influence government that way.

And that metric was really important in setting that strategic direction for us. And then as an organization, we wanted to look at also, which I didn’t show today, was how do we measure the impact of an activity a bit more directly, and we realized we weren’t very good at capturing all of the great things that we were doing. And while we were evaluating them, we weren’t really reporting on them in any way.

Sarah: So we’ve gone through a process to develop a tool that we can use internally to the organization, so that we can actually capture our initiative and align and contribute to our vision. And then over time, be able to use that information, not just for reporting, but actually to influence our business planning and budgeting, to make sure that we’re always very focused on trying to achieve those metrics in the social impact metric that I presented. Hopefully that answers the question.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you very much, Sarah. We have several questions left, so Sarah please reply in a simple manner. Second question is: do you have any advices on how to increase the membership and to collect the member subscription fee because you need to have funds to run the program, that actually the governments should be running with their tax funds.

Sarah McCauley:

Yes, good question. A lot of the stuff that we are doing, there is a role for government as well. And part of what we do is advocating for them to take action, but we just find that doing demonstration projects is a great way to actually drive some action sometimes as well.

But in terms of our, I suppose, membership recruitment, so our model essentially works on the fact that we provide products and services, we reinvest our profits for the benefit of WA, because we have this really clear purpose, vision, and mission, members know, and even the community know why we exist and what we’re trying to do. And that then creates positive sentiment towards REC, which actually then results in more members. So we have actually found that the impact of our social and community impact activities is actually driving more members for us as well.

We also offer member benefits and other things like that, that provide additional incentives for people to be REC members. And I think the other important aspect is as with all organizations, we need to look at how we remain relevant for our members. While what I presented today is very focused on the things that we’re doing with and for the community and the members, obviously some of that and particularly around the mobility space, for example, feeds into our products and services.

So we recently launched a… or we’re trialing a product in our insurance area, which is almost like a pay as you drive insurance product. So we essentially reward people for driving less and choosing public transport, walking, cycling on certain days, which supports our goal, our target of reducing vehicle kilometers traveled per person. But it also makes our insurance offering a bit more attractive to people who don’t need or want to drive their car every day.

So that’s a good way where we look at trying to align our products and services where we can, to the things we’re trying to achieve in our social and community impact area.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you, Sarah. So next question is: in Japan there are more accidents by elderly drivers so people think that their license should be revoked, is it the same in Autraslia ? We also see in Japan accidents because people get confused with the pedals. Do you have those problems ?

Sarah McCauley:

Thank you for the question. So we don’t have a similar subsidy system, but safe vehicles is an important part of our advocacy. And so for example, with REC, we don’t ensure cars that have been ANCAP safety rated. So this is an Australian safety rating program, that don’t have four or five-star safety. So, we do some things ourselves to help encourage people into safer vehicles, but we don’t have anything specifically from the government.

And then in terms of older drivers, yeah, that again is a common challenge I think people are seeing worldwide with the aging populations. So it is something that definitely we need to do more in that space. We don’t have any specific activities where we are targeting older drivers at the moment. I think one of the challenges we face as well in Western Australia is that public transport is quite limited in a lot of areas because of our geographical distribution, and especially in our regional areas.

So it is a very challenging situation, because a lot of people don’t have another alternative to the cars. So that is something that obviously we are advocating for a lot, in terms of increased investment in public transport. In moving forward options like driverless vehicles, for instance, one of the key benefits that they will help deliver is increased mobility for people who are aging and also people with disabilities.

So that’s been a really important part of our Intellibus trial, trying to understand the benefits and the challenges in that regard, and trying to help feed into that discussion around inclusive design, to make sure that the potential of these vehicles to increase mobility is actually realized.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you, Sarah. So final question for you is: what are some of the actions that you plan to promote eco-friendly vehicles?

Sarah McCauley:

The electric highway is one of our key initiatives. That is designed to address range anxiety issues, so to make it easier for people to travel between Perth and the Southwest, or through the Southwest in an electric vehicle. But some of the other things that we’re doing, for example, I think I mentioned that we are advocating for mandatory CO2 emission standards for new vehicles.

So we don’t currently have that in Australia and because of that, there’s not really a great incentive for manufacturers to introduce a wide range of vehicle models here that are lower and zero-emission vehicles. So our access to different models is quite limited at the moment. And our CO2 emissions per kilometer driven are much higher than many other countries for that reason. We’ve been doing a lot of work in the advocacy space around fuel quality as well, as I mentioned, which is really positive to see the government taking action to accelerate reduced sulfur standards in fuel, but from an organizational perspective, one of the other things that we’ve been doing as well is that we have what we call a lesser emissions mission.

So we actually give discounts on insurance and roadside services and auto services for members who own and drive lower emissions vehicles. So that’s one way we try to reward our members for making those sort of environmental choices. And that’s something that we’re going to review and refresh over the year as well. So yeah, we’re doing quite a lot in that space to try and help with uptake, because we definitely have seen slower uptake here than in a lot of other countries.

Something else that we’re lacking here, which a lot of particularly European countries do well is incentives. So trying to reduce the cost differential between buying electric or low emissions vehicles and a standard ICE vehicle. That’s some of the things that we’re doing.

Tsutomu Matsubara (AOA):

Thank you to all for joining today.

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