NGO leaders across Africa unite for safe school zones
Amend, an FIA Foundation - hosted Child Health Initiative partner, has brought together NGO leaders from nine different African countries to agree an advocacy action plan for safe school zones across the region.
Amend convened road safety campaigners from Benin, Botswana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mozambique, Ghana, Tanzania, Namibia, and Zambia . Together, they agreed country specific strategies to deliver safe journeys to school by the end of 2019.
Many of the NGO leaders are part of the Amend project to implement life-saving infrastructure around 10 different schools in 10 different countries , using the School Area Road Safety Assessment and Improvements (SARSAI) programme. The project, co-funded by the FIA Foundation, aims to highlight the impact of the life-saving infrastructure at the pilot schools as an urgent call to action to governments to scale up these interventions.
With nearly all of the 10 pilot schools completed, the group is now faced with the challenge of leveraging government funding to ensure a full roll-out of safe school infrastructure and the lowering, and enforcing, of speed limits around schools.