Our Work

Save the Nation's School Environmental Road Safety Assessment and Improvement Program is focused on reducing school-related injuries in cities where children are at high risk. It includes a systematic review of school environments, identifying steps to improve road safety, and implementing those measures. This work includes:

• •Identifying schools where children are most at risk of road traffic injury
• •Evaluating school areas: child behavior, the behavior of drivers and other road users, and physical infrastructure
• •Government and community involvement
• •Identifying appropriate steps to improve safety based on the assessment
• •Implementing measures including infrastructure improvements (speed bumps, sidewalks, signage, new school gates), crosswalks, and community and school road safety education
• •Monitoring and evaluation

Ideally, all roads and infrastructure would be made safe by the government. But that is not the case today: children in the school environments selected for SNA intervention are injured in traffic every year. As a supporter of long-term measures to promote well-being, we believe it is important to implement proven solutions that save lives today — our interventions include proven steps to reduce injury rates.

Reflector wear has been distributed to elementary schools in Addis Ababa as part of the traffic awareness campaign package, a project supported by the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa. The reflector vests are vital for school safeguards: they make them visible on the road whenever they are on duty and protect them from possible traffic injury, as drivers can easily spot them from any direction.

SNA also provided reflector vests for disabled persons at the targeted schools.

Safe road use is a concept that must be learned. Road safety education should be an integral part of all efforts to improve the safety of road users — in particular the most vulnerable, especially children. Road safety education has been a key, ongoing part of Save the Nation's work since we first started working in Ethiopia in 2013; to date, we have reached thousands of children with our school-based road safety education.

We focus on providing road safety lessons in primary schools, because young children — owing to their small size and underdeveloped perception skills — are at great risk of road traffic injury. We also provide education for secondary schools, communities, and street children who do not attend schools.

Our lessons teach the basics of what it means to be safe when using the road. To ensure a focused environment, we teach a maximum of 50 children at a time. Using entertaining instruction and songs, classroom teaching, and practical lessons, we provide tools that perpetuate learning in schools and ultimately spread throughout communities. Lessons are tailored to the audience and the local road environment, but the basic messages include:

• •How to be seen by drivers
• •How to choose a safe place to cross
• •How to cross safely
• •How to walk safely along the road
• •How to find a safe place to play, relax, or do business

Part of the challenge is making certain that road safety lessons are regularly reinforced even when we are not on-site. To do this, we stay in close contact with high-risk schools through the years. Knowledge retention surveys of our primary school program consistently show that children who receive our instruction retain vital road safety knowledge even months after we visited their school.

Save the Nation has been implementing various training programs in the Gulele sub-city of Addis Ababa to train primary school students. The training develops and recruits students who can fill the role of traffic police in and around their school zones. Students are selected from every school to be student traffic safeguards. During the early morning rush hours and in the afternoon, they safely allow their fellow students to cross busy intersections.

The community in the project area has applauded SNA's achievements in raising students' awareness to help increase road safety. The students' efforts in raising awareness among their peers have been recognized by SNA and by the Ethiopian federal traffic police commission. Save the Nation awards recognition certificates to the trainees after an intensive two-week training.

Save the Nation supported and distributed traffic slogan billboards to schools at high risk of road traffic injury in Addis Ababa, as part of our traffic awareness campaign in the city. The billboards are two-faced — visible from both sides — and easily moved by school traffic students. They are displayed when students are coming into and going out of school. Drivers can see the boards even from far away, prompting them to slow down and take extra caution, and the text on the boards preaches road safety in a beautiful way.

While the general population in Ethiopia already faces some of Africa's highest rates of road traffic injury, certain groups are at even greater risk. These particularly vulnerable road users include child pedestrians — who must walk by the sides of Ethiopia's dangerous roads, often in the dark — and motorcycle taxi drivers.

Save the Nation custom-designs programs to reduce injury among these high-risk groups. Motorcycle taxis are proliferating across Ethiopia, bringing the huge benefits of affordable transport to people who never had it before — but with those benefits come shockingly high injury rates. Through focus group interviews we found that the majority of drivers receive no formal training and have no driving licenses, motorcycles are poorly maintained, and drivers and passengers rarely use proven-effective safety measures like helmets and reflector-enhanced vests.

So we provided training to motorcycle taxi drivers in three rural areas. The course included theoretical and practical elements, covering:

• •Road signs, signals, and markings
• •Road traffic law and regulations
• •Defensive driving
• •Motorcycle documentation
• •Practical driving
• •Customer care and entrepreneurship
• •Preventive maintenance

Save the Nation executes road safety media campaigns. One example is a project we ran in partnership with the American Chamber of Commerce Ethiopia (AmCham). The project comprised the development of a media campaign to increase road safety awareness — focusing on safer school zones and driver awareness of vulnerable road users — and to promote AmCham's involvement in road safety.

The project involved assessing the existing level of road safety awareness in Addis Ababa. Through these tasks, we developed a media campaign of roadside billboards. Post-campaign surveys determined that the program increased the general public's knowledge of road safety in general, and of the importance of safer school zones in particular.

• •Produce road safety awareness campaign materials for targeted road safety interventions
• •Organise workshops and seminars on road safety — demonstrating seatbelt use, helmet wearing, and reducing drink driving, speed, and other risk factors
• •Integrate international road safety awareness events such as UN Global Road Safety Week and the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims into road safety plans nationally and at local level
• •Host an annual road safety awards ceremony, Road Safety Fundraising Concert, and related events to create awareness and promote road safety
• •Promote the voluntary use of high-visibility material for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists

We also develop specific educational measures aimed at vulnerable road users, in particular:

• •Safe crossing by pedestrians
• •Awareness of intoxicated pedestrians
• •Use of personal protection equipment for cyclists and motorcyclists
• •Awareness of blind spots on highways
• •Road users and workers at road works
• •Care for young road users