Last week, our team was in the beautiful province of Limpopo in South Africa to train 20 youth leaders in road safety. The project, funded by the Michelin Corporate Foundation and conducted in partnership with the Global Road Safety Partnership South Africa (GRSP ZA), the Department for Transport and Provincial Government of Limpopo took place from 17-21st July 2017. The trained Youth Ambassadors are the first of their kind in South Africa who have been set the mission to reach out to their communities with road safety messaging.
As being one of our favourite continents in the world to train, you can be sure that our recent training in Limpopo, South Africa was vibrant, engaging, energetic, informative and fun! From 17-21 July 2017 we delivered our first Youth Ambassador for Road Safety Training in the country.
The programme was initiated in 2015 by the previous South African Minister for Transport Dipuo Peters who envisaged a National Youth Structure to involve young people in road safety. This was formed around the principles of YOURS, to empower young people to be part of the road safety solution by building their capacities (skills, knowledge, attitudes and intentional behaviour) to improve the situation of youth on the road.
Since then, the Global Road Safety Partnership South Africa (GRSP ZA) and our long standing founding member Michelin (through the Michelin Corporate Foundation) formed a strategy to educate and activate the elected youth in the National Youth Structure for Road Safety. This was realized in the First Youth Ambassadors Training initially focused on the Province of Limpopo.
“I’ve never attended a training of this calibre…I learned a lot, for the first time I sat throught a whole training and never felt bored, we will take what we have learned as ambassadors for road safety back to our communities”.
Lesidi, Youth Ambassador for Road Safety
20 young leaders selected from Limpopo underwent a 5 day intensive training on road safety theory using YOURS’ unique training methodology that couples active, youth friendly learning with key road safety knowledge. Participants were trained on the following topics:
- Peer Education
- Scope of the Road Safety Problem – in the world and in South Africa
- Youth and Road Traffic Injuries
- Distracted Driving
- Speeding
- Seatbelts
- Drink and Drug Driving
- Facilitation Skills
- Presentation Skills
- Developing a Youth and Road Safety Workshop
- Spreading the Message
- Action Planning
The Youth Ambassadors, having learned a whole range of road safety topics and methods to engage their peers in their communities, will go back and filter our road safety messages using their own creativitiy and language contexts. Every youth participant pledged to take robust action to play their part in reducing road traffic crashes in Limpopo, a province with a particularly high rate of road crashes amongst young people.
“The YOURS Youth Ambassadors Training really exceeded my expectations, it was wonderful to see how the youth participated…the knowledge they have gained and the enthusiasm they will leave with, we look forward to the implementation phase”.
Dr. Pieter Venter, GRSP South Africa
The next phase of the training will see the Youth Ambassadors implement road safety communcations in their community and connect their learning to road safety interventions. The Ambassadors will be training young people in Grade 11-12 in Limpopo on the risks of the road through creative methods as well as campaign for road safety on a national level.
Peer education is an especially suited modality because it provides the opportunity for youth to work together cooperatively and collaboratively, and to support each other in making wise choices. In addition, when peers have first-hand, authentic experience of the issues being addressed, they are more credible role models than adults, who may appear as though they are preaching. Such a modality usually encourages high participation and continued long term motivation, especially so among young males, who are more significantly influenced by role models who understand their issues from a personal perspective.
Watch our video from the training: