On April 16, 2012, YOURS launched its first-ever road safety toolkit.  Targeting young people all over the world. The kit aims to introduce road safety in a concise, yet clear and appealing way. In order to know more about that kit, we interviewed our Programs Officer, Ms Nellie Ghusayni, who is the leader author of the Youth and Road Safety Action Kit! You can also read behind the scenes of the design process in an interview YOURS ran with lead designer at Airspace Studio Mr Mark Woodwood.

Q: Why did you decide to write the kit?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approached us offering a small grant to develop a document for young people through the capacity development programme they have with the International Union for Health Promotion and Education. It started out as a 10-15 pages simple document with basic information that will benefit young people. There is a lot of information on road safety available but it is not very accessible to youth, the language is not youth “friendly” and the content can be too technical, and not all young people can access the internet to find what they want.

Q: Why and how is this kit unique?

I think the Kit is unique for three reasons. The first is its content. The content is what we believe, through our consultation with youth from different parts of the world, young people need to know about road safety and creating their own projects. It’s the bottom line, the essentials, the basics.

The second reason is the writing style used. As you know, road safety is not a very exciting or entertaining topic for young people. Information on road safety can be very dry and “unfriendly” to young people. We worked with Kate Brown, an experienced editor for youth publications to make the writing as friendly as we can without it being too informal or even patronizing. We tried to use humor, sarcasm, every day words to make reading the Kit more enjoyable.

The final reason is the design and layout. The Kit had to be different. It had to be attractive. It had to stand out. It had to look and feel like a document young people might want to pick up. AirSpace Studio came up with the concept of designing 3D models so everything that you see in the Kit was actually built and then photographed. I think Mark told you more about the design in your interview with him.

Q: How did you go about researching the topics?

The first thing we did when we decided to write the document is get in touch with our youth network with questions on what they would like to know more about, what would benefit other youth in their country- even those not currently involved in road safety, what can help get more youth active and things like that.

We had a group of youth from all regions putting their ideas and thoughts forward. After this brainstorm that gave enough ideas for many publications, we focused on the purpose of the document. Why are we writing it? What are the main things we want to achieve? Then we went back and created an initial list of topics that will be addressed. with time more topics were added and others were removed, all with consultation with members of the youth network and experts.

You can imagine there was a lot of back and forth and changes before we settled on what we have now. Our main references were the World report on road traffic injury prevention, the series of good practice manuals produced by the UN Road Safety Collaboration and other key documents all cited in the Kit.

Q: What was the most enjoyable part of the authoring and creation?

Definitely the design process. Until Mark started showing us what it would actually look like it was just a very long Word document for me, a document I have been working on for months and can hardly look at anymore. The design process made it come to life. It made me believe that eventually the document will actually be published.

Q: What was the most challenging part to writing this publication?

It is very difficult to think of the most challenging part, there are many! As I mentioned we started with a 10-15 pages document that we thought we can finish in a couple of months. I have not written anything like this before so I had no idea of what was coming. The main challenges were in deciding what information to include and what to exclude.

There is a lot of knowledge, we need to learn a lot, and the needs of youth even in the same country vary. Integrating the feedback of experts and youth when they reviewed Kit was also difficult. As you know, the Kit was reviewed by young people from many countries and from experts and we wanted to integrate as much of their thoughts and suggestions to make the document as useful as possible. Perhaps most challenging of all was deciding to stop making changes and edits.

Q: How was the experience of turning your writing into a designed piece?

This is the best part by far. The design process is incredibly exciting, especially when you are working with a very creative team. I couldn’t wait to see the first concepts Mark created, the pagination, the typography, imagery, everything. and after every presentation I would get even more excited. It is amazing to see how text can be transformed and how much a good design can bring to an otherwise lifeless document.

Q: How do you feel about the end result?

I am thrilled with the end result- although part of me still does not believe that it has been published. In a way what we have now is even better than what we had imagined. YOURS is a very young organization, officially we are 2 years old, and this is our very first attempt at producing a road safety publication.

Q: Any final comments?

The Youth and Road Safety Action Kit is only a tool- a tool to provide youth with information on road safety and help them get involved. Its success, and our success, is its use. If young people do not pick it up and read it and if some of them do not decide to take action then we did not really do much. So we have to get the document to the youth, in their languages, in their countries and communities, and we have to show them how they can use it.

Finally, I would like to thank all the people who supported the development of the Kit whether by financial contribution, technical assistance, expert reviews, personal advice, or listening to me talk about it. The list is very long so I will not mention names but a heartfelt “thank you” goes out to everyone who has contributed in any way. You know who you are. Thank you!

Q: Where do we find the action kit and how should it be used?

The YOURS action kit is available online for free download here and can also be used as a training tool. We already trained trainers in Oman for example last month, before it was actually printed, and it was a great success.

You can also read an interview run by GRSP with Nellie Ghusayni about the Kit!

In his regular column giving us a unique insight into road safety in Africa, Brian Mwebaze writes today’s article on the importance of making road safety a subject that is appealing and attractive to young people. Based on his own experience of a recent workshop, Brian offers a solution to avoiding the traditional means of learning and making education ‘sexy’.

Yep, That’s correct! (English) Oui, C’est ca Exactement!(French) هذا هو الصحيح (Arabic) Eso es correcto!(Spanish) Det er korrekt! (Danish) Isso é correto ! (Portuguise) …Sorry for those whose languages don’t appear here! Iam not trying to create a language traffic accident lol but we are talking about Road Safety being Sexy?!Woohoo….Kinda exciting huh?

On the weekend of 27th May 2012, I had a chance to participate as an observer in our regional road safety campus safety awareness workshop. In attendance of course were our East African Red Cross Youth Campus Programme Superstars (pictured below). These 23 superstars work as focal point contacts for the universities and selected schools in the East African region. Our organization had hired a consultant to run the session. So, now you understand why I requested to be in and learn a tip from the consultant!

In a flash, he came in with a well prepared agenda. He had a cool Prezi presentation with technicalities cutting across road design, visibility, pre and post crash care, the mechanics of injury and crashes…woo! It was quite exciting, After that the presentation, he took the 23 man squad on the road and demonstrated what he meant during the theory session<<<something you must credit the guy.

He later after a series of theory and practice gave a written evaluation test.. However, our superstars struggled to answer correctly because they didn’t have time to read, prepare and assimilate the learned information…you get the idea right? You could see their faces and feel a little sorry for them. But you see, the organization hadn’t paid cheaply this guy…plus, he was doing his job! 

Meanwhile in the far corner where I was sitting, I was thinking, this aint cool bro, is it? Our superstars are University and School students. I am sure when they got the invitation, they thought it was going to be different from the class environment type. After the session, I did an evaluation and one consistent outcome from the respondents was “…not sexy session …” ‘SEXY?” (jaw drop)…”Really?” But…I didn’t get the point. I was dipping my head into sand to find out the best way of approaching this. How could we send real messages home? How could we make sure that the road safety messages stick into these young minds brains …it was a moment of thinking and thinking. …little did I know the answer was around the corner.

On a fresh Sunday morning while at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport waiting for my connection flight to Brussels then Geneva for the UNAIDS presentation on the global youth reproductive health services and rights outcomes from the CrowdOutAIDS campaign…I remembered something! Over 5000 global young voices participated in this campaign in a short time. But what made them get so interested? What made them consistently turn up and respond to the questions that were being asked? What made them turn up the next day?

It must have been about the need to know more information about their reproductive health rights? It should have been their inner passion to make a good contribution to ensuring zero HIV new infections. But, also, it could have been because some of them are young people living with HIV. No..Not that alone…as I found out in the final report that I wrote that very night, it was because the approaches used under CrowdOutAIDS were sexy!

The approaches spoke the language of the youth! The CrowdOutAIDS used tailor-made approaches holding online sessions for the urban youth and offline sessions for the rural youths. Materials were pretested in the language of all targeted groups. In the same way, I would say “If its sports that youth engage in, formulate programs that provide information about road safety through sports; if its Broadway shows, incorporate information on road safety in the shows; if the youth hang around malls, put up promotional posters with road safety information; get celebrities in your district/village that are idolized by the youth to support causes on road safety even by being Goodwill ambassadors and reach out to their fans or subjects; if it’s the language of iPods, make applications that can be downloaded on iPods; if it’s through X-box or Wii, make games that provide information on road safety; if their language is texting, sell this idea to communication companies in your country to send some road safety tips as texts and encourage young people to share stories freely (just not while driving). You get my point, make the education relevant, appealing and engaging to the language young people are speaking today.

Just like my local town bus company, put a slogan that reads like ‘Your Safety Is Our Safety” The public transport system fairly penetrates the rural areas and could be a cool platform to get to rural youth!

In conclusion, I took a step back and thought, ‘How can we make road safety sexy?’, then it hit me; this is what YOURS does everyday. From their cool website design, the amazingly attractive Youth and Road Safety Action Kit and the clear depiction of ‘fun learning’ in their recent road safety workshops. 

By engaging with young people on their level, we have to be prepared to test what works and use facilitators that can connect with young people based on their own social, cultural and community contexts. This way, we can open a dialogue of active learning rather than creating a classroom situation where young people feel they are being lectured once again, bearing in mind that most of these workshops take place out of the formal education arena.

#FoodforThought #StaySafe