Our Work

Save the Nation’s School Environmental Road Safety Assessment and Improvement Program has been focused on reducing school-related injuries in cities where there is a high risk for children.
This includes a systematic review of school environments, identifying steps to improve road safety and the implementation of those measures. This work includes the following
• Identify schools where children are most at risk of road traffic
• Evaluation of school fields regarding child behavior, behavior of drivers and other road users, and physical infrastructure
• Government and community involvement
• Identify appropriate steps to improve safety based on the assessment
• Implement measures including infrastructure improvements (speed bumps, sidewalks, sidewalks, signage, new school gates, etc.), crosswalks and community and school road safety education.
• Monitoring and evaluation
Ideally, all roads and infrastructure are protected by the government, taking into account. But that’s not the case nowadays. In general, children in a school environment selected for SNA intervention are accounted for traffic injury per year.
As a supporter of long-term measures to promote well-being, it is important to implement proven solutions to save lives today. SNA intervention includes proven steps to reduce injury rates.

Reflector wears has been distributed to elementary schools in Addis Ababa. This was one of the programs from the traffic awareness campaign package with the project supported by the U.S Embassy in Addis Ababa. The reflector vests are vital for the school safeguards as it makes them visible on the road whenever they are on duty it will protect them from possible traffic injury as drivers can easily spot them from any direction.

SNA also supported the 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, and in particular of the most vulnerable users, especially children. To this end, road safety education is a key and ongoing part of Save the Nation’s work, and has been since we first started working in Ethiopia 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, as we know that young children, owing to their small size and underdeveloped perception skills, are at great risk of road traffic injury. However, we also provide education for secondary schools, communities, and street children who do not attend schools.

Save the Nation’s lessons teach the basics of what it means to be safe when using the road. In order 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 to perpetuate learning in schools, which ultimately spread throughout communities. Our lessons are tailored to the audience and 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 of this work is to make certain that even when we are not on-site, road safety lessons are regularly reinforced. To do this, we stay in close contact with high-risk schools through the years. Knowledge retention surveys of our primary school program have consistently shown that children who receive our instruction have increased knowledge of vital road safety information that they retain 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 in schools within the sub city. The training aims to develop and recruit students who can fill the role of traffic police in and around of their school zones. Students selected from every school to be student traffic safe guards. The student Traffic safe guards during early morning rush hours and afternoon safely allow their fellow students to cross busy intersections by regulating on roads.

The community in the project area applauded the achievements made by SNA in the community by raising the awareness of students to help increase road safety measures.

The students efforts in raising awareness of road safety amongst their peers was always recognized by SNA and by Ethiopian federal traffic police commissions. Save the Nation awards recognition certificates for the trannies after intensive two weeks training.

Save the Nation supported and distributed traffic slogan billboards to schools that highly risked for RTI in Addis Ababa. This is one of the program from the traffic awareness campaign the project in Addis Ababa. The billboards are two faced which can be seen both sides and are easily mobile by school traffic students. This billboards displayed when students coming in and going out of the school. These traffic billboards will help all schools to protect their students from traffic injury. The boards are visible for drivers even from far and that enable drivers to see and take extra cautions. So when ever these billboards displayed on the road drivers easily detect it and slow down. The text on the boards are very attractive that preaches road safety in beautiful way.

The general population in Ethiopia has the Africa’s highest rates of RTI, certain subsets of the population are at even greater risk. Those groups of 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. Our programs for child pedestrians are discussed in the Infrastructure and School Education sections of this page, so here we will give an example of a program we designed for motorcycle taxi drivers.

Motorcycle taxis are proliferating across Ethiopia. These taxis are bringing with them the huge benefits of affordable transport to people who have never had it before. Unfortunately, with those benefits come shockingly high RTI rates.

In attempting to determine why rates of RTI are so high among motorcycle taxi drivers, we found through focus group interviews that the majority of drivers receive no formal training and have no driving licenses, motorcycles are poorly maintained, and drivers and their passengers rarely if ever use proven-effective safety measures like helmets and reflector-enhanced vests.

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

• 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 that we ran in partnership with the American Chambers of Commerce Ethiopia (Amcham)

The project comprised the development of a media campaign to increase road safety awareness (focusing on safer school zone and driver awareness of vulnerable road users) and to promote the 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 that was roadside billboards. Post-campaign surveys determined that the program increased the general public’s knowledge of road safety in general and the importance of having safer school zone in particular.

• Advocate, raise the profile of road safety and help all road users understand the risks of their behaviour to themselves and others
• Supports the work of the Ethiopia Police and enforcement agencies to the general Public to ensure that the public understands their objectives
• Monitoring and/ or supporting the implementation of road signs in collaboration with local authorities and funding from corporate partners and stakeholders
• Advocate for the utilization of 10% of infrastructure investments for road safety in all new road projects across the country
• Lobbying for and ensuring sustained funding for road safety initiatives across the country
• Supporting local authorities to adopt ownership & accountability of road safety local initiatives in their localities and support development of local road safety schemes
• Work with the government enforcement agencies to review and strengthen road traffic offences

• Produce road safety awareness campaign materials for targeted road safety interventions
• Organise workshops/seminars on road safety by demonstrating through the use of seatbelts, helmet wearing and reduce drink driving, speed and other risk factors
• Integrate international road safety awareness events such as UN Global Road Safety Awareness Week and World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims into road safety plans nationally and at local level.
• Host annual road safety awards ceremony, Road Safety Fundraising Concert and relevant events in creating awareness and promotion of Road Safety
• 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 high ways
• Road users and workers at road works
• Care for the young road users
• Promote the voluntary use of high visibility material for pedestrians, cyclists & motorcyclists.