Road traffic injuries are the number one cause of death and disability for children between the ages of 5 and 21 in the developing world — in areas where little, if any, emergency and pre-hospital medical care is available.

Remember the adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”? It’s true. The most effective way to improve this reality is to stop the incidents before they happen.

There Are No Accidents

There are reasons so many children fall victim to motor vehicles. And the majority of them are preventable.

In most developed nations, automobiles and society coevolved. As cars got bigger, faster, and more numerous, traffic-safety measures became standard. But it took a deliberate and concerted effort, from the 1960s onward, to bring road-traffic-injury rates down in the West. In developing nations, fast and large vehicles have arrived before safety awareness.

In the African nation of Ghana, for example, the traffic-injury rate among children is astronomically high. Why? Driving is chaotic. Many roads are dusty and poorly marked. There are few sidewalks and only limited access to school busses and other public transportation for children. Vehicles are poorly maintained and lack safety features considered standard elsewhere. Many drivers do not use headlights at dusk. Streetlamps and traffic lights are rare and often in disrepair. And neither drivers nor pedestrians are educated about even the most basic safety principles.

Throughout Africa, economic growth has put ever more motor vehicles on the roads, but has not supplied the infrastructure to support them. School schedules are such that many children are forced to walk to and from school in the dark. And, again, most children are not taught simple road safety. All of this has resulted in a traffic-injury epidemic in Africa, where 1 in 100 children will die from traffic injury before their 15th birthday.

This is why Amend.org launched our Be Seen, Be Safe initiative. We are one of the few organizations working on the prevention of childhood injury in the developing world, and one of only a handful confronting traffic injury. The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that “the interventions promoted by Amend, such as the Be Seen, Be Safe program, are perfectly in line” with those being promoted by the WHO.

It may be a while before economics and political dynamics allow some countries to make their roads safer for children. But Amend has identified simple, cost-effective methods that are changing the reality on these nations’ roads and saving children’s lives right now.

Be Seen, Be Safe

Our flagship program includes six central interventions:

• primary school road-safety instruction
• the distribution of printed road-safety materials for classroom and home use
• the distribution of reflectors
• PR and media lobbying
• data collection

Since its founding in 2005, Amend has worked around the clock to implement and test Be Seen, Be Safe. We constantly monitor and evaluate the program to insure its maximum impact.

The Result

We’ve already measured a positive change in the road-use behavior of children who have received instruction from our pilot road-safety program.

In 2009, we will complete a comprehensive impact evaluation. The evaluation is the first of its kind and will supply us with the information and tools we need to expand our reach and create a scalable model of Be Seen, Be Safe in countries other than Ghana.

Self-Sustaining

Another pioneering element of Be Seen, Be Safe is that it enables communities to improve and maintain traffic safety themselves. We hire local staff and work with regional government and media to raise awareness and educate children, teachers, parents, and community leaders.

To help with funding, we have launched an earned-income initiative that draws upon local labor and resources to generate the means to support our programs in the places where they are located.

Amend recognizes that the only way to do what we need to improve and save lives is to educate, empower, and always evolve.

We don’t make false promises and we don’t rely on bureaucracy. Where we can, we act fast. But when we must first observe and study, we do — continually learning the nuances of our environment, to ultimately produce the most effective and lasting changes.