Vivo Energy, others embark on road safety education in selected schools
Vivo Energy Ghana (VEGH) is partnering the National Road Safety Commission (NRSC) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to embark on a road safety education in selected schools situated along high risk roads in the Greater Accra Region.
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The initiative has been necessitated by the fact that knowledge and skill of road usage among children is very low; there are limited safety facilities such as walkways and safe crossing points for pedestrians.
At the opening of this year’s annual refresher training for facilitators of Vivo school road safety empowerment programme in Accra, the Greater Accra Regional Manager of the NRSC, Ms Catherine Hamilton, said: “The safety of children on our roads is a problem because we have not collectively as a people taken the issue of their safety seriously.”
“We need to, as a matter of urgency, consider child safety issues because they threaten the survival of our future leaders and our development as a country,” she said.
The programme brought together headteachers and road safety facilitators from some selected schools in the Greater Accra Region to be trained in road safety to help schoolchildren to reduce avoidable risks.
The participants were taken through contemporary road environments, road signs and markings and their operationalisation.
Road fatalities among children
Ms Hamilton said, for instance, that about 21 per cent of all road fatalities involved children below 16 years.
“It is for this reason that the commission has decided to focus on promoting pedestrian safety, especially among schoolchildren, throughout this year,” she said.
She said the NRSC was continuing with the provision of crossing aids, popularly called “lollipop stands,” at selected pedestrian crossing points, especially in school environs, to help schoolchildren to cross the road safely.
“Children are at a high risk of being hit by vehicles, especially in settlement areas,” she said, adding that the commission, therefore, saw the workshop as a step in the right direction as participants would be educated on road safety for them to impart it to the students.
Vivo and road safety
In a speech read on his behalf by the Corporate Communications Manager of Vivo, Mrs Shirley Tony Kum, the Managing Director of the company, Mr Ebenezer Faulkner, said the campaign, launched in 2014 in partnership with the NRSC, had the broad objective of educating schoolchildren to behave in a conscious, civilised and safe manner as pedestrians, as passengers and as cyclists.
He said the company had formed the VEGH road safety clubs and had also provided road safety tool kits to all members of the club and facilitators in order to enhance road safety education in the schools.
Mr Faulkner outlined a number of interventions the company had undertaken in the area of road safety, including the funding of the construction of speed humps, repainting faded road markings, and mounting lollipop stands in Accra, Tema, Takoradi and Tarkwa.
Touching on other areas, he said last year, Vivo donated 50 writing desks to Kwashieman ‘2’ Primary, 300 solar lamps to schoolchildren in the Sefwi Ahwia District in the Western Region and 100 solar lamps to the GES for distribution to schools in the Greater Accra Region to promote learning in the evenings.