Late last year, YOURS initiated its second global road safety awareness campaign; the Embrace Life Campaign. This unique photography competition brought together over 50 countries from around the world to participate in our awareness raising project illustrating how young people ’embrace life’ and consequently commit to road safety to preserve it. Now, after we selected our winners back December 2011, a project on the ground has been implemented by the winners of the Embrace Life photo competition with support from YOURS.
The Embrace Life Campaign had a simple motivation behind it, to remind young people why we love life, the people, the things, the memories and the moments that inspire us to live our lives to its full, once acknowledging these special aspects of life, young people were asked to simple keep these dreams, goals, loved ones and passions safe by committing to road safety.
The task was easy, take a picture of yourself embracing life and tell us why you commit to road safety. As a small incentive, YOURS offered the best, most creative, most inspiring pictures a 1000 Euro prize to initiate their own road safety project in their own local area. After receiving hundreds of pictures from the four corners of the world, YOURS along with its specially chosen judges selected the best entries and the 1000 Euro prize was granted after a strong project plan was formed.
These touching pictures showing life and young lives in Africa inspired our judges who chose this selection as the winning entry.
We are no strangers to the fact that a well executed grass roots projects requires preparation, planning, partnership and hard work which is why nearly seven months after we announced our winner; Ms Sheila Atieno and Ms Daphne Kemunto from Kenya, their unique project has finished its implementation stage just a few weeks ago.
In a special ‘on the ground project’, YOURS’ funding for the project built a partnership between globally renowned road safety organization Amend, based in Tanzania to run a programme to ‘train the facilitators’ from Kenyan organizations; Youths for Road Safety Kenya (YOURS-KENYA), Usalama Watch Initiative and ASIRT-Kenya. This formed part of a training for Amend’s See and Be Seen programme to train the facilitators from these organizatons who could then train the young people in the above pictures to be safer on their trips to and from school.
The objectives of the training were to:
- To train eight participants and equip them with right method of providing Road Safety Education.
- To provide Road Safety Education to two schools.
- To create awareness on Road Safety.
On day three of the See and Be Seen programme, trainers were shown how to work with young people in schools to teach them on road safety.
In a report Amend stated that Kenya has put a lot of investment in building and improving its road infrastructure systems. This is in line with vision 2030 and the National agenda. The construction of the means of transport allows all the road users faster movement. Unfortunately most of the constructed roads and even the older ones are not user friendly. There are no clear Road Safety education on how to use the, the roads are not well marked and traffic lights are not respected. The most unfortunate of it all is that most of the children or younger road users find it very difficult to cross these roads because they are not equipped with the right information and behavior practice.,
The training provided both the participants and the pupils with an opportunity to learn on the best ways of saving lives and especially through education. Everyone who attended the meeting felt it was a worthwhile and of great success. They all made a commitment to spread the ‘good news’ to as many people as they can reach. The head teachers of the two respective schools were very happy and welcomed us back any time for further training and participation.
Manpreet Darroch, YOURS’ Communications Officer who designed the Embrace Life Campaign said, ‘From a worldwide campaign that brought together hundreds of young people who pledged and commited to road safety, we have now implemented an on the ground project with the winner of the Embrace Life photo competition. When we saw these photos last year, Daphne and Sheila’s contribution capturing these precious young lives really made us want to give something back to these children. Now through this See and Be Seen program, they will be equipped with the skills to be safer, I am thrilled to see success of the project’.
YOURS will be running an interview with project facilitators from Amend and our CORE Group Representative Ms Sheila Atieno who won the Embrace Life Photo competition to share more about their experience. We congratulate this project and as the freshly trained facilitators run their workshops with young people in Kenya, we are hoping that we can save lives of a generation of young people to come.