Amend-Ghana NGO Urges Strict Enforcement Of Road Safety Regulations

A Road Safety focused NGO, Amend Ghana, has tasked law enforcement agencies to enforce road safety regulations and severely punish persons who contravene them.

The Country Manager for Amend Ghana, Amma Oduro Dankwa, in an interview with Citi News said a strict enforcement of the regulations will help deal with road accidents in the country.

Child pedestrians are among the highest-risk groups in Africa for road traffic injury. Unlike their peers in wealthier regions, the vast majority of schoolchildren in urban Africa – over 80% in a study, walk to school, and they usually do so unaccompanied.

A child in Africa is twice as likely to die on the roads than a child in any other region, and in some parts of Africa's quickly growing cities, road traffic injury rates among child pedestrians exceed 3% per year.

To address this pressing public safety issue, Amend-Ghana has developed, implemented and evaluated evidence-based programs to reduce the incidence of road traffic injury in sub-Saharan Africa. Amend works across the continent and has offices in Ghana, Tanzania, and Mozambique.

In an interview on the sidelines of a campaign at the Ayalolo Cluster of Schools at Agbogbloshie on Thursday, the Country Manager for Amend-Ghana, Amma Oduro Dankwa, said the NGO has developed tools to drastically reduce road accidents especially at areas where school children are.

“We at Amend specialize in child road safety especially safe routes to school. In Africa we have more kids walking to school than going to school in vehicles. The fatalities on roads yearly are about 2000, and out of that we have 40 percent being pedestrians. Most kids walk to school, and they form a larger percentage of the pedestrians who are knocked down.”

We specialize in improving the journey to school and ensuring that they get to school safely. We target high risks schools. The Hansen road is a very busy one, and we have a lot of trucks, motorbikes, and cars using this road and this means these school kids are at risk.

She said drivers who ply routes close to schools in Ghana often drive beyond the authorized speed limits.

“In our Road Traffic Act, there is a 30 km per hour speed limit for school zones, so to improve this, or to help calm the vehicles down, Amend-Ghana has installed speed humps. We have also put in place two zebra crossings. There are nine schools within the Ayalolo cluster of schools and the SDA school so we have placed them at vantage points.”

She decried the lax enforcement of road traffic regulations in the country, noting that most drivers “are aware of the laws, but they disregard them and break them” because fines are not imposed on them.

“They just continue to do the same thing so what we at Amend-Ghana are doing is to put in measures that will force people to slow down when they get to intersections, school zones and key areas. This is indirectly enforcing the law”.