Celebrating your birthday by dedicating it to road safety – The Gambia

Celebrating your birthday by dedicating it to road safety – The Gambia

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

Birthdays need no explanation, they are celebrated in nearly every culture worldwide as an auspicious occasion. When you’re average youngster turns 25, they often get their friends together, have a party, drink some beers and cut a cake, but not Siaka K Dba but then Siaka is not your average 25 year old. He set a new precedent for socially conscious young people by dedicating his birthday to road safety. Read about it here.

Siaka K. Dibba is a Social Justice Activist from The Gambia who has great passion for Road Safety, Women and Children’s rights issues. 22nd February 2013 Siaka turns 25years. As an activist he chooses to celebrate his birth in a unique way.  

A birthday is a day when a person celebrates the anniversary of his or her birth; it marks an addition to ones age and celebrated in the form of party and gift giving. Well as he grew +1, he dedicated his silver jubilee to Road Safety.

One might ask why road safety instead of a party and cutting a cake? The reason is not far-fetched; road crashes are the leading killer of young people globally.

More than 1000 young people die every day and thousands more are seriously injured. Every single act could contribute to reduce the statistics and make the world’s road safe. As a result of the above, Siaka raised a fund through friends/family and also his monthly earning to support crash victims at the Gambia Teaching Hospital-Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital Banjul. 

Siaka and the organizing committee of the birthday action visit a hospital in Banjul.

The social justice activist who is the Program Officer of National Youth Parliament of The Gambia and also an executive member of Your Change For a Change (YCFaC) on the 22nd February accompanied by musicians, youth leaders, hospital management and religious leaders visited Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital, Gambia’s #1 Hospital to meet road crash victims. During the visit the delegation had the opportunity to present gifts in the form of food items, pay hospital bills for those who could not afford them, pray for them, and learn their stories in terms of the impact of the road crash they have been involved in and also donated blood at the blood bank. 

Giving a Birthday a new face is a new initiative pioneered by Siaka K. Dibba in the Gambia and it is aimed at inspiring the younger generation into the work of charity and giving back to their communities. According to Siaka, he drew his inspiration from YCFaC (www.ycfac.org) a non-profit organization founded on the 06 day of April 2011 by a group of young individuals who are motivated to give back to their communities.  “This initiative is in line with the objectives of the organization that is inspiring the younger generation into the work of charity” he stated.

At the end of the visit, Siaka thanked God Almighty who have given him the strength, health and wisdom for the past years, his parents and entire family for supporting all throughout to raise to a responsible adult. Friends in The Gambia and outside denied themselves a family size pizza and a party to support this initiative. He called on all to drive with care, for the life saved could be theirs as well as that of other. He also informed the delegates about two new campaigns “Long Short Walk” which is a unique campaign calling for pedestrian safety across the world initiated by ‘Zenani Mandela Campaign and Road Safety Fund’ and the “Global Road Safety Film Festival” organised by LASER International in partnership with Youth For Road Safety. He encouraged them to come on board to participate for The Gambia, Africa and the world at large to save lives.

The young people involved in making the day a success wear Siaka’s ‘The Advocate’ t-shirt.

Do you want to celebrate your birthday in a more meaningful and productive way? If your answer is YES, then BIRTHDAY SPACE on Facebook is the space for you to join and let us know. We have a team with wealth of experience to help you organize, raise funds and do the logistics… Together we can! Your Little Change can Change the WORLD! Good idea? Would you do this for your birthday? Let us know!

Are you eligible for FREE entry to the Global Road Safety Film Festival?

Are you eligible for FREE entry to the Global Road Safety Film Festival?

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

The Global Road Safety Film Festival is the most celebrated and prestigious festival for road safety film makers in the world. This year, for the first time ever, LASER International have joined forces with YOURS to launch the Youth Category to the festival which is FREE for youth and road safety entries!

If you have created a video for road safety targeting young people or if you are a young filmmaker (or a group of young filmmakers) that have created a film for road safety, you can enter it into the LASER International Global Road Safety Film Festival 2013 for FREE!

The usual entry price is €100 per film entry but for the youth category, it is totally free and you can submit as many videos as you want as long as they fit the youth criteria.

So why not take advantage of this offer? Its easy to take part and you can find out all the information that you need here. Additionally, if your film is shortlisted, you will be invited to the festival and have the €50 entry free waivered (you must, however, cover your own travel and accomodation costs).

The winner will receive the prestigious LASER International trophy for the best in category and also receive a special €300 cash prize to spend on a local road safety project or film. There is still lots of time left to enter so get your films ready and send them in for free!

We think this a great opportunity for young people to showcase their filmmaking skills and we know there are lots of films out there, created by young people, tackling road safety that could receive this international acclaim. It is important to put youth and road safety issues on the agenda at such international events where governments, international organizations and other key road safety stakeholders submit videos for nomination.

YOURS will sit on the jury to judge the youth category and so we encourage our network from all corners of the globe to take part, submit your films and who knows, you may just be the first ever winner of the Youth Category for the Global Road Safety Film Festival 2013.

For other categories of the festival, check out the festival website but please note, the entry fees will apply.

Get creative: Take a picture for the Long Short Walk with a designed board

Get creative: Take a picture for the Long Short Walk with a designed board

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

This year we have launched the youth edition of the Long Short Walk. So if you consider yourself an artsy type or if you love taking photos (both is even better), then this campaign is for you! All you have to do is download our board, either design it or not, write your message on it and take a picture.

The Long Short Walk is a unique campaign calling for pedestrian safety across the world. It has been initatied by the Zenani Mandela Campaign and the Road Safety Fund, which aims to capture ‘short walks’ in your community and collect these captures from around the world and combine it into one ‘long walk’.

Everybody travels to get to their destinations, whether to school, to work, to the shops or even travel just for the sake of walking. Unfortunately, some people’s walks are incredibly unsafe; unsafe footpaths, bad lighting and poor road discipline, The Long Short Walk wants to capture these images to illustrate the importance of a ‘Safe Walking’ and to prioritize this part of a new global Sustainable Development Goal. Implementing pedestrian safety measures is cost effective, and many of the solutions are simple. It can be introducing pavements (84% of roads surveyed by iRAP have no pedestrian provision); providing safe crossing points; ‘calming’ streets with traffic humps, rumble strips and chicanes; and lowering vehicle speed limits in areas where traffic and pedestrians share the road space.

YOURS is mobilizing the Global Youth Network for Road Safety to take part in this campaign! Our youth network members, Vida Urgente in Brazil submitted their photo against the backdrop of the Brazillian Carnival.

After the great success of the Embrace Life Campaign, which engaged young people from over 50 countries, we know that young people around the world can unite for the common goal of road safety, this is why we are using the platform of the Long Short Walk to engage even more young people to unite for road safety and take part in our contribution to the campaign!

So what does it entail?
The Long Short Walk is a photo exhibition but YOURS has added a slight twist to get your creative juices flowing. Simply download our ‘I’m Walking For…’ board, add your own message, add some designs to it if you are arty and take a picture of you holding it. You can also take a picture of your walk (highlighting whether its safe or not) and send it to us. We will brand the photos, add it to a unique YOURS exhibition as well as sending it to the global campaign to where it will be showcased during the Second United Nations Road Safety Week.

As with all campaigns that we run, we have added a competitive element. The most creative photos will be awarded with a special prize (tbc). Simple as that. Want to take part? Click on the banner below and see more information.

Killer Crotches – a clever approach to combat texting while driving

Killer Crotches – a clever approach to combat texting while driving

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

By now, we should all know the dangers of texting while driving. It is an issue that has been spearheaded in North America and recognized as a serious issue facing young people around the world. Texting while driving falls into the ‘distracted driving’ risk factor of road safety and since mobile phones entered the vehicle, campaigns have been springing up to combat this issue. Killer Crotches is a unique campaign from Alberta, Canada.

Of course, ‘crotches’ do no kill but to others, when texting, you appear to be looking down to your lap and it is this dangerous action that can cause a lifetime of damage. Averting your eyes for just five seconds from the road is all it takes for a crash to happen.

Alberta Transportation told their local news teams,

“Our goal is to get their attention, and to ultimately save lives, and the way to do that was to come up with a campaign that spoke to them and generated conversation,”

The campaign targets 25- to 34-year-old male target audience. The campaign features a multi-platform media outreach including, digital washroom ads, talking urinal pucks, web banners, radio adverts, bill boards and posters. The campaign also features an innovative parallax scrolling effect on its website which recreats the act of looking down at the phone while driving and all the things you could miss in five seconds. You can experience the campaign site here.

Commissioned by the Alberta Government, Canada, the campaign is an innovative addition to the field of road safety campaigns. They said, ‘distracted driving is a serious issue in Alberta. To encourage drivers to put an end to this dangerous behaviour, we launched a two-phased campaign. The first wave calls attention to drivers who attempt to ‘hide’ texting by taking their eyes off the road and staring ‘down there’. The second phase speaks more directly to the rational side of people by asking them to think about how long a text message takes to send, and the dangers that this lengthy distraction has on the rest of us’.

Read more about the campaign here!

Have you come across innovative road safety adverts? We would love to hear from you and see them!

Make road safety a policy priority – Guardian Development

Make road safety a policy priority – Guardian Development

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

A recent article on the Guardian’s Global Development focus; globl road safety in focus, illustrates the importance of governments and multi-sector partners to put road safety at the forefront of their transport and safety agendas to ensure that a increasing loss of life is not continued in developing countries. We the youth, as the most affected social group call upon these actors to implement safety policies around the world

The original article appears at Guardian Global Development’s – Road Safety in Focus

Road deaths will dramatically increase in the world’s poorest countries unless governments and multilateral development banks swiftly and radically overhaul their transport policies, according to a new report.

Already, 1.3 million people lose their lives on the world’s roads every year, with road accidents now one of the leading causes of death in the developing world.

In its new report, the Make Roads Safe campaign, a global coalition co-ordinated by the FIA Foundation, warns that deaths will see a “relentless increase” if sustainable transport policies are not put at the heart of debates on development after the millennium goals expire in 2015.

The rising death toll will largely affect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, there are about 134,000 recorded road deaths in the country every year. The Make Roads Safe campaign predicts that India could add 90,000 deaths by 2016 if transport policies remain unchanged.

“The message we must take from this report is that road safety is one of the biggest development challenges facing the international community,” said the report’s author Kevin Watkins, from the Brookings Institution.

“The basic problem is that road and transport planners in developing countries and the powerful multilateral development banks continue to think of transport systems as a question of journey times, speed and cost, and neglect to put people first.”

Despite the criticism, multilateral development banks say efforts are being made to ensure that sustainable transport is considered central to any new infrastructure projects funded by bank loans. At the UN’s Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in June, eight of the world’s largest development banks announced they were to jointly invest $175bn in sustainable transportation systems over the coming decade.

“At the World Bank, we are committed to working on road safety as part of our strategy for safe, clean and affordable transport for development,” said Jose Luis Irigoyen, director for transport, water and IT. “Our new projects in countries such as Argentina show the right direction, which is a more holistic approach. We will continue to work … to ensure that road traffic deaths and injuries are never a price to pay for development.”

The report also says unsustainable transport policies pose a major threat to efforts to tackle air pollution and climate change. A huge increase in the numbers of cars across the world will inevitably increase the number of people dying from air pollution. Outdoor air pollution already kills as many people as traffic accidents, with up to 90% of the pollutants for these deaths – such as carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide – coming from petrol-fuelled vehicles.

Even though many existing transport policies are focused on economic progress, traffic congestion loses up to 3% of the GDP of many major cities.

The Make Roads Safe campaign says responsibility for the failure to make transport sustainable lies at the door of national governments and the multilateral development banks.

Many governments have failed to implement sustainable policies or even enforce existing road safety legislation, yet development banks that spend billions of dollars every year financing road building systematically neglect safety, and put speed and economic efficiency over the safety of people.

“Over the past few years we have been hearing a lot of encouraging mood music from the World Bank and other multilateral development banks around road safety but precious little action,” said Watkins.

“A simple proposition such as ensuring that no transport-related proposal goes to the board unless it … [includes] a clear target for reducing road deaths and meeting basic safety standards would make a huge difference yet this still fails to be done. They need to get off the fence and start taking responsibility for tackling a growing problem, which their institutions are clearly reinforcing.”

The report calls for the inclusion of sustainable transport and road safety within the post-2015 sustainable development goals, targeting a 50% reduction in global road deaths by 2030. It wants an extra $200m (£130m) spent each year on aiding the development of national road safety strategies in the poorest countries.

At what it calls a “crucial” time for halting a surge in road deaths, the Make Roads Safe campaign is urging donors, governments and development banks to build on the consensus at Rio+20 that safe and sustainable transport must be an essential component of development strategy. It says that the current debates on a post-2015 development agenda provide the opportunity to reframe transport policy around safety and sustainability.

“This is the first year that we have seen the big development banks really sitting up and making sustainable transport an active part of their agenda,” said Cornie Huizenga, joint convener for the partnership on sustainable, low carbon transport, who lobbied on sustainable transport at the Rio+20 conference last year.

“There is a growing realisation that with rapid global urbanisation we are facing critical choices about what kind of transport infrastructure we need to have, and that the old model of simply building roads isn’t going to work on any human, environmental or economic level.

“For the first time I am genuinely optimistic that sustainable transport can and will be included in the post-2015 development agenda, although obviously we have huge challenges ahead when it comes to getting our voice heard amid the competing demands of the different sectors such as energy and agriculture to have their agenda represented in a set of new sustainable development goals, but I do think the momentum is building.”

Youth declarations attached call for this action!

Road safety through the vibrancy of a carnival – Vida Urgente

Road safety through the vibrancy of a carnival – Vida Urgente

by | Dec 7, 2023 | News & Blog

The colours of the Brazillian Carnival are a great metaphor for young people around the world. The carnival depicts diversity, vibrancy, energy, positivity and fun! So approaching this event with a road safety message through the same rainbow of colour and energy has been a successful method in engaging young people in a road safety message. Read more about it here!

Vida Urgente, translated as  ‘Urgent Life’ employs a host of life promotion messages to encourage young people to make healthy decisions and embrace the life they live in positive ways. Vida Urgente are a longstanding member and supporter of YOURS and were part of the taskforce that shaped the foundations of the organization. They also helped to launch YOURS in Moscow in 2009.

Continuing their dissemination of road safety messages in Brazil and wider South America, the organization recently took a road safety message to the vibrancy of the Brazilian Carnival. The auspicious Brazillian Carnival has been well documented around the world bringing together bright colours, samba dancing, outrageous and jaw dropping outfits and an overall feeling of positivity. Porto Alegre city – Brazil was the backdrop for a great carnival experience.

Vida Urgente told us:

“As you may know the Carnival in Brazil is a very huge event, mobilizing thousands of people, where the risk of accidents on roads increase considerably, so we developed this campaign in outdoors format and folders, that will be delivered into stations tolls roads, to thousands of drivers who will be traveling due to the Holiday”.

The campaign was run in major newspapers across the country. Each folder contains in the front, an art allusive to Samba School’s flags, where the names of school are replaced to “Empire of the driver’s time”,” Academics of Safe Driving “and ” United Taxi Tour.” Beside these flags, a Carnival message for Vida Urgente : “Abre Alas para a Vida. Dirija com segurança neste Carnaval” something like “Open area to life. Drive safely in this Carnival. “
 
The back of the brochure brings the messages “Boarding into the revelry of Carnival  and be parto of life’s block,” followed by tips on transit: – Speed limits, Use of seat belts, Car review, Using mobile while driving, Kids in the back seat with chairs and Sleeping at the wheel.
 
Also part of the campaign for the carnival, Vida Urgente already started running an exclusive campaign road safety jingle on radios across Brazil. This unique jingle focuses on;

A radio jingle for the holiday, which blends traditional drumming Carnival sounds with traffic accidents sounds, and in the end, the voiceover says: “Unfortunately this has been the beat of Carnival for many young people. Make party, but if driving do not drink” 

You can listen to the radio spot here. To finalize our Carnival campaigns, like here in Brazil this season is summer, we put in more than 300 power poles, in more than 15 cities, an adhesive-size, in the shape of a boy and a girl, that simulate a hug on the pole where you can read writing on the back: “It has something much better for you to embrace this summer. If driving, do not drink”. (attached)

Finally, our friends at Vida Urgente didn’t forget to add a global element to their campaign by taking part in the YOURS edition of the Long Short Walk! They submitted a slection of photos against the backdrop of the Carnival which we will publish soon! You can also take part in the Long Short Walk here.