News & Blog Archives - Page 58 of 188

We’re back from facilitating a strategic advocacy workshop for Amend – Ghana

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

Akwaaba to Accra, Ghana! On 3-4 July, Amend organized a strategy workshop for their safe school area work in 10 African countries. NGO leaders from Benin, Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia attended the workshop.

YOURS was asked to lead the development and structure of the program, as well to facilitate the workshop.

The Amends’ safe school area program provides simple, targeted infrastructure measures – including footpaths, speed humps, bollards, and zebra crossings – that decrease vehicle speeds and separate child pedestrians from traffic. They recently completed a multiyear impact evaluation: the program reduced injury rates by more than 26% and lessened the severity of the injuries that did occur.

To make the program sustainable Amend built in a very crucial advocacy part. NGO’s implementing safe infrastructure around schools to protect children is a fantastic effort. However, the governments of the countries must be involved to scale up the initiative and maintain realized safe school areas. It is clear that each country has its own political dynamics and momentum. The two-day workshop was designed to support NGO leader to further develop their advocacy plan.

The two days started with reflections and sharing knowledge and experience from each country. Together they produced a clear list of lessons learnt and challenges. NGO leaders were also asked to develop and analyze their SWOT. While the workshop progressed and we captured all reflections of the first 18 months of the program, the NGO leaders started to look forward. What is the specific country advocacy goal and what are its strategic objectives? On day two the NGO leaders developed their more detailed action plan and added activities, accountabilities and a timeline.

The workshop finished with a presentation from each NGO leader to the representatives of the FIA Foundation and Puma Energy Foundation. Both are sponsoring the program and very interested to understand the progress made and the future plans until December 2019.

YOURS would like to thank Amend and its amazing staff for this opportunity to collaborate and we congratulate you all on this remarkable project. We wish each NGO leader the best of luck with the implementation of their advocacy plans.

“Workshops can be dull, death-by-PowerPoint exercises in tedium. The team at YOURS takes workshops to a whole new level, designing engaging, exiting workshops that help groups achieve their goals in fun ways. The difference between a normal workshop and a YOURS workshop is like the difference between a grey, drizzly winter day, and an afternoon in the early-summer sun.”

Jeffrey Witte – Executive Director: Amend

Reporting back from a successful South African follow up training – Polokwane

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

In July 2017, we trained 20 young leaders from across the Limpopo Province in South Africa. These leaders were selected for their influence and leadership in their communities; their linkages and access to hard-to-reach communities such as those in townships and their passion for social justice and change.

In partnership with the Global Road Safety Partnership in South Africa (GRSP ZA) and generously funded by the socially responsible company Michelin, the programme took place over 5 days in Bela-Bela, South Africa.

After being rigorously trained through an intensive information packed workshop, these leaders became the first cohort of South African Youth Ambassadors for Road Safety. They were trained in a range of topics including road safety in South Africa, why crashes happen, why young people are at risk, factors surround gender, risk factors including speed, distracted driving, drink and drug driving and seatbelts as well as lifelong skills such as presentations skills, facilitation skills and road safety messaging.

A year on, these Ambassadors reconvened in Polokwane, South Africa (July 2018) to reflect on their achievements, address the challenges they faced and gain new skills to improve their work as Ambassadors and take their road safety activities to the next level.

Follow Up Training
In collaboration with the management at GRSP as well the Ambassadors themselves, we devised a training programme to address key achievements during their first 12 months as Ambassadors as well as identifying the new skills they would need moving forward. The training took place in Polokwane, South Africa from 3-5 July 2018.

The training focusing on topics including: Looking Back – Our Achievements; Looking Back – Our Challenges; Leadership; Fundraising; Advocacy for Youth Issues; Communication and Looking Forward – Our Action Plans. The training enabled the Ambassadors to improve what they have been doing, share their work with one another to energize their work.

Looking back at their achievements, the Ambassadors have been very busy. From working on roads leading to townships, to school visits across whole districts, the Ambassadors have been spreading the word of road safety across Limpopo.

The Ambassadors, who represent the 5 municipal districts in Limpopo have been working in teams to conduct localized and tailored messaging according to the need of the community.

For example, in the Capricorn District, Ambassadors run a drunk driving campaign over the Easter Weekend; in Sekhukhune, Ambassadors successfully lobbied the local municipality to install speed humps around schools and conducted scholar patrols to enable young people to get to school safety, navigating through traffic; in Vhembe, Ambassadors run social media awareness campaigns using their local leadership status to run “live streams” talking about the importance of road safety and sharing skills such as avoiding distracted driving to be safer road users.

An action taken by many of the Ambassadors across the region was talking at “After-Tears” events. After-Tears is a uniquely South African phenomena where after a funeral, guests will drink heavily, play loud music and celebrate the life of their loved one. Unfortunately, during many of these events, young people tend to drink heavily and drive home; our Ambassadors used the After-Tears events to formally address road safety and the importance of not driving home drunk. These talks had particularly prevalence in Mopani.

In Vhembe, Ambassadors run road safety sessions in 11 out of 14 schools in the municipality reaching approximately 600 young people with an aim to reach all schools by the end of the year. The Ambassadors used their newly acquired facilitator skills to run workshops with the students away from the traditional classroom style and in a more engaging, interactive manner.

The Ambassadors continued to reflect on some of the challenges they faced in their work and collectively addressed these challenges as group. The group were aided in building strategies to address challenges such as a lack of resources, resistance from the community and poor road infrastructure.

READ THE FULL COUNTRY PROFILE

Youth Road Safety Ambassadors in South Africa to brush up new skills with YOURS

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

South Africans pay a high toll for road traffic crashes, especially amongst young males aged 14-35. In July 2017, we partnered with the Global Road Safety Partnership South Africa (GRSP ZA), the Government of South Africa (Ministry of Health and Transport) and the Michelin Corporate Foundation to deliver the first Youth Ambassadors for Road Safety Training in the country. 20 young leaders, selected for their activism and standing in their communities joined YOURS in Limpopo Province to be trained on road safety knowledge and peer education methods.

Michelin, in their ground breaking approach to global road safety, and whom are long standing founding member of YOURS funded the programme (through the Michelin Corporate Foundation) to equip these young people with the skills they needed to reach out to their communities and raise road safety consciousness across society. The project was organized by GRSP ZA in collaboration with the Provincial Government of Limpopo and the Department for Transport.

We will be back in South Africa next week (4-5-6 July) to run a refresher training with our South African Ambassadors. In 2017 we trained 20 youth leaders from across Limpopo Province, South Africa. Since the last training, these Ambassadors have been out in their communities running road safety workshops, campaigns and spreading positive road safety messages across the province.

This training will reflect on what the Ambassadors have achieved already, some challenges they may have faced as well as building their skills in leadership, communications, fundraising, advocating for road safety with youth and strategizing their future work.

Check out the video to see the vibrancy and energy of the South African Ambassadors in action!

We will be live-tweeting and sharing information from the training on our Twitter page as well as report on our website after the training.

About YOURS Workshops
We use our years of expertise in workshop delivery to develop the capacities of young people in the field of road safety. With global experiences from Belize, Cambodia, Kenya, Niger, Oman, Saint Lucia, South Africa and the USA, YOURS is able to provide youth-friendly, highly interactive and dynamic workshops for young people. These workshops have big impact on the lives of young people are create robust youth action to reduce road traffic crashes amongst 15-29 year olds.

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Avoid a World Cup penalty by having none for the road!

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

We are well into the magical championship that is the FIFA World Cup. The football tournament is the most watched sporting event in modern history and continues to bedazzle and amaze with some of the world’s best players. Whether your country is in the world cup or not, there’s no escaping world cup fever.

There’s another phenomena that often accompanies sporting events like the world cup; excessive drinking. You may find yourself having a beer at odd times in the day, during the day-time matches or drinking more than you usually do midweek for the evening matches. That’s why we are endorsing the message of Somerset Road Safety’s World Cup Campaign: “Avoid a World Cup Penalty by having none for the road”.

Somerset (UK) County Council’s road safety team is urging everyone to keep the roads alcohol free during the World Cup.

Many people enjoy having a drink or two while watching the football, and with the World Cup kicking off in June this is something that will be happening across the nation and around the world. The road safety team want everyone to enjoy themselves, but at the same time ensure the roads are kept as safe as possible by raising awareness of the dangers of drink-driving.

You may think you know your limits and how much you can drink while still being safe to drive, however, the likelihood is you’re wrong. You may not realise it but it only takes one alcoholic drink to begin to affect your ability to drive safely, and alcohol can affect you differently depending on a number of factors that include:

weight
age
sex and metabolism (the rate your body uses energy)
what you’ve eaten recently
the type and amount of alcohol you’re drinking
stress levels

It’s also important to remember that alcohol can linger in the blood stream for far longer than you may realise and it’s possible to still be over the legal limit to drive the morning after a night out drinking. In the UK, the system works on ‘units’, knowing units can help but avoiding alcohol all together if driving is the best approach.

In the UK, being caught drinking driving can include the following penalties:

A minimum 12 month driving ban
A criminal record
A hefty fine
Up to 6 months in prison
An endorsement on your licence for 11 years

Road Safety GB have designed a set of promo materials to be used during the World Cup including:

The theme for International Youth Day 2018 is Safe Spaces for Youth

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

Youth need safe spaces where they can come together, engage in activities related to their diverse needs and interests, participate in decision making processes and freely express themselves. While there are many types of spaces, safe spaces ensure the dignity and safety of youth.

Safe spaces such as civic spaces enable youth to engage in governance issues; public spaces afford youth the opportunity to participate in sports and other leisure activities in the community; digital spaces help youth interact virtually across borders with everyone; and well planned physical spaces can help accommodate the needs of diverse youth especially those vulnerable to marginalization or violence. In addition, we at YOURS believe that safe spaces should include a safe journey to those safe places.

Ensuring that safe spaces are inclusive, youth from diverse backgrounds especially those from outside the local community, need to be assured of respect and self-worth. In humanitarian or conflict prone settings for example, youth may lack the space to fully express themselves without feeling uncomfortable or unwelcome. Similarly, without the existence of safe space, youth from different race/ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation or cultural background may feel intimidated to freely contribute to the community. When youth have safe spaces to engage, they can effectively contribute to development, including peace and social cohesion.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, specifically Goal 11, emphasizes the need for the provision of space towards inclusive and sustainable urbanization. Furthermore, the New Urban Agenda (NUA) reiterates the need for public spaces for youth to enable them to interact with family and have constructive inter-generational dialogue.

At YOURS, we couple this with Goal 3.6, By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents, where young people remain the biggest affected group in terms of crashes. Road traffic crashes remain the biggest killer of young people; the no.1 public health concern for young people globally.

“With access to safe spaces, young people also need safe mobility to get to these places, to ensure a safe journey”.

Additionally, the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY) which is the UN framework for youth development, prioritizes the provision of “leisure activities” as essential to the psychological, cognitive and physical development of young people. As more and more youth grow in a technologically connected world, they aspire to engage deeper in political, civic and social matters, and the availability and accessibility of safe spaces becomes even more crucial to make this a reality.

International Youth Day takes place on August 12th 2018

Follow UN Youth on Social Media: @UN4Youth /UN4Youth

Distracted driving, everyone hates it but many people do it – new study

by Youth For Road Safety | Dec 30, 2023 | News & Blog

Insurance company Esurance has a new study out on distracted driving in the USA, and it makes for interesting reading. Almost everyone agrees distracted driving is bad, yet it’s still remarkably prevalent. Even drivers who report rarely driving distracted also report that they engage in distracting behaviors. The study also raises some questions about the growing complexity of modern vehicles, particularly the user interfaces they confront us with.

Almost everyone does it

According to official figures, around 10 percent of all road deaths are due to distracted driving. That percentage has held steady for a while now after peaking at 15 percent a decade ago. In the time since, governments and the auto and tech industries haven’t been ignoring the problem. Texting-while-driving bans are ever more common. Smartphones now have do not disturb modes, some of which can turn on automatically. Phones can also cast their displays and certain apps to the car’s center stack using Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

And modern vehicles are increasingly packed full of advanced driver aids—what the industry calls ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems)—like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot monitoring, collision alerts, and so on.

The Esurance report includes survey data from more than a thousand participants. More than 90 percent said that browsing for apps, texting, and emailing were distracting. Yet more than half of daily commuters admitted to doing it. The survey also found that the longer your commute, the greater the chance is you’ll get distracted, probably by your phone.

Even participants who reported they were “rarely distracted” admitted to distracting behavior like talking on the phone or even viewing GPS Navigation data. (Any task performed while driving should be able to be performed in under two seconds to avoid becoming a distraction.)

Esurance also wanted to know if ADAS was actually making us safer or lulling drivers into a false sense of security. Almost half said semi-autonomous technology (like adaptive cruise control) makes their driving better, but one in ten of those surveyed believe the latter. But an important finding was that drivers of cars with lots of tech in them reported being more distracted than drivers of older or less advanced vehicles.

In addition to the survey, Esurance interviewed a number of drivers of modern, ADAS-equipped cars. The report features anecdotes about automatic emergency braking saving someone from a crash but also complaints about complex user interfaces some drivers have to contend with.

It’s not an equal playing field

If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s that there is a lot of diversity out there when it comes to implementing ADAS and designing good automotive UIs and UXes. Three cars from three different OEMs can all have similar-sounding systems that nevertheless have different operational domains or use different ways to alert or warn the driver.

Take the combination adaptive cruise control and lane keeping; these assists will behave very differently in a Tesla Model X (letting you go hands free for minutes at a time, automatically changing lanes for you) than in a Nissan Leaf (does a good job of staying centered in a lane, nags you a lot and disengages after 15 seconds) or a Toyota Camry (warns you when you depart a lane, couldn’t feel it steer for me at all).

Different companies also have different alert philosophies—a lane departure warning might consist of a haptic alert (vibrating seat or steering wheel), a visual alert on the main instrument panel or aheads up display, an audio alert, or a combination of some or all of those. Those alert noises made it into Esurance’s list, and 29percent of those surveyed said they found in-car warning sounds to be a distraction.

The best ADAS implementations can be a boon, particularly for drivers who log a lot of miles highway driving. But highway driving is already relatively safe, and not everyone is convinced semi-autonomous systems are the way to go. It’s clear they are a life-saving safety net for the distracted or drowsy driver, yet some maintain that semi-autonomous systems are dangerous, as they can foster “mode confusion”—you think the car is driving itself when it isn’t.

A vivid example can be seen in the two official reports into the fatal Tesla Model S crash in Florida in May 2016. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration inquiry concluded that the car was not at fault, and that version of Autopilot (which has since been superseded by a new version that remains to become as capable) had reduced Tesla’s crash rate by almost 40 percent. However, the National Transportation Safety Board conducted a separate inquiry with a very different conclusion. Unlike NHTSA, NTSB did point its finger at the car, citing issues with the car’s operational design and pointing to the Tesla’s UX as a major factor in the crash.

What can we do about it

Esurance ends its report with some recommendations for drivers—nothing revolutionary, just common sense steps. Put your phone somewhere you can’t see it or at least silence notifications while driving. Set your navigation destination before you set off, rather than while you’re dodging other road users. Drive, don’t eat or apply make up or shave behind the wheel. And pull over if you need to attend to an emergency or a distracting child.

We know that young people are glued to their phones for all sorts of social and entertainment reasons but from the early onset of technology and road safety, we have advocated for a distraction free road user experience.

Will you pledge to be distraction free?

Adapted from the original article written by Jonathan M. Gitlin here.