Alumni Spotlight: Vanessa Cueva, Ecuador

Alumni Spotlight

Vanessa contributes to Ecuador’s US$300 million National Safe Mobility Program

2024–25 DRSC alumna Vanessa Cueva is a Transport Consultant based in Ecuador, where she works on road safety policy, Safe System integration, and national programme development. She previously served as a senior figure at Ecuador’s National Transit Agency, where she led the integration of the Safe System Approach into the country’s National Road Safety Strategy.

“Since completing the DRSC course, I have shared road safety knowledge through workshops, technical meetings, and project preparation activities with government officials and transport stakeholders. One of the greatest road safety challenges in Ecuador is shifting the conversation from assigning blame after a crash to understanding how the road transport system can be improved to prevent deaths and serious injuries.”

Vanessa has worked in the transport sector for more than ten years, but her commitment to road safety sharpened after contributing to Ecuador’s Road Safety Yearbook 2023 in collaboration with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Confronted with the scale of the country’s fatality data — 23.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants — she enrolled in the Delft Road Safety Course to deepen her expertise and become a more effective advocate for change.

Since completing the course, Vanessa has contributed to the technical design of Ecuador’s National Safe Mobility Program, a nationwide initiative developed to address the country’s road fatality rate. The program applies the Safe System Approach across governance, infrastructure, vehicles, road user behaviour, and post-crash response, and is currently under preparation with an investment of US$300 million financed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

A central lesson Vanessa took from DRSC is that road crashes are not the fault of individual users, but the result of a system that has failed to anticipate human error. She has applied this perspective consistently in road safety project development, in her work with government officials and transport professionals, and in public-facing communications to reframe how road safety is understood and acted upon in Ecuador.

Vanessa has also shared her DRSC learning through workshops, technical meetings, and project preparation activities. She estimates that more than 100 professionals from national and local institutions have taken part in these exchanges, covering Safe System principles, road safety management, infrastructure safety, and data-driven decision-making.

Vanessa credits DRSC with strengthening her understanding of the Safe System Approach and enabling her to move from traditional transport planning into active road safety advocacy working across policy, programme design, and institutional reform to make Ecuador’s roads safer.