‘Arrive Alive’ campaign to go nationwide next month

The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) will, by the end of this month, roll out the "Arrive Alive" campaign nationwide to reduce road crashes and fatalities.

This follows the successful pilot of the initiative in the Greater Accra, Ashanti and other parts of the country in December last year.

The campaign was one of the many initiatives by the NRSA to mitigate the occurrence of road crashes and fatalities during the 2020 electioneering and the Christmas festivities.

During the campaign, officials of the NRSA and other partners created awareness among road users of the need to be disciplined by wearing crash helmets and seat belts, avoiding needless overtaking and promoting defensive driving.

National rollout

In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the Director-General of the NRSA, Mrs May Obiri-Yeboah, said the campaign was largely successful and needed to be sustained and scaled up to all parts of the country.

She said the government had given its commitment to provide the needed funds for a nationwide rollout of the initiative.

"The government is seeking funds for us to roll out the Arrive Alive campaign on a bigger scale across the country. We wanted to start in June this year, but we had to do some mobilisation of resources, so that we can start the second phase of the campaign fully this month,” she said.

Lessons

Mrs Obiri-Yeboah said the authority had learnt useful lessons from the pilot phase of the campaign to guide the main project.

She explained that as part of the campaign, the NRSA would increase advocacy and stakeholder engagement to ensure that all actors within the transportation value chain played active roles in bringing sanity to the roads.

"We are now in all the 16 regions of the country and so we will take our outreach programmes to churches, mosques and communities, so that everyone will get road safety education," Mrs Obiri-Yeboah said.

Restructuring

The NRSA Director-General also said the authority was focused on building the capacity of its human resource as part of a restructuring process to reflect its status as an authority.

 Among the core functions of the NRSA in its new mandate are the establishment of procedures for road audit, investigating violations of road safety, developing inspecting and enforcing road safety standards, as well as regulating road transport and related services.

Mrs Obiri-Yeboah said fulfilling that mandate required a skilled human resource, which was why the restructuring exercise became necessary.

"Our target is to ensure that for the next 10 years we will see a totally different story about road safety," she said.

She said the NRSA was working with other state agencies, such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) and the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service, to enforce standards and regulations to reduce the carnage on the roads.