Child-friendly neighbourhoods
Road Safety Awareness, Philippines
Summary
The aim of the intervention is to create awareness about road safety by learning traffic rules. This approach is more focused on integrating road safety education for children and drivers. As children at an early age can learn quickly, this will have a big influence on creating good habits.
Context
As children are the most vulnerable road users, special attention is required to make them aware of road safety issues. Dr. Margaret Chan, who was World Health Organization (WHO) Director General until 2017, wrote, “More than 1.2 million people die in the world’s roads every year, and as many as 50 million others are injured.” Around 90% of those deaths happen in low-income and middle-income countries, the Philippines included. Thus, the Philippines government has put a big emphasis on educational measures for children concerning a safe road environment.
Transformational measures and activities
In order to educate children at an early age about road safety, the government has regulated some acts about road safety education. A National Road Safety Awareness Act is being promoted to integrate road safety education in the school curricula in all levels including barangay (local) day care, preschool, non-formal, technical, vocational, indigenous learning, and out-of-school youth courses. This act will ensure education about road safety at all levels especially among the children. These educational initiative are complemented by measures such as the Volkswagen Philippines’ Child Safety Initiative (CSI) programme. This is a corporate social responsibility campaign launched in 2015 and designed to educate small children on basic road safety. Since then, it has been visiting different malls, providing short seminars that explain road signs to children, conducting “driving tests” and issuing junior driver’s license cards. This measure can be implemented in Metamorphosis Global as proposed “Road Safety Training Mat for Children” for practical implementation of educating traffic rules.
Results
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Challenges, opportunities and transferability
This scheme is a practical in depth solution as it can create consciousness as a habit for children. This can change the whole scenario by making people aware of traffic casualties from the very beginning of their life and can have a larger impact in the society.
In depth
- Road Safety 101 for students and drivers: starting them young [Accessed 4 April 2019].
- Volkswagen PH’s kiddie road-safety advocacy also (somehow) teaches adults [Accessed 4 April 2019].