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Promoting Child Road Safety in Vietnam and Legislative Milestones in Cambodia |
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Dear Friends and Supporters, At AIP Foundation, we have been taking the time to celebrate the small wins in our daily lives—with our loved ones, with our colleagues, and in our continued work and commitment to saving lives on the roads. Through our 2019-2020 Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign in Ho Chi Minh City, we launched interactive classroom sessions and road safety education at a primary school located in a high-risk road environment. Through recent classroom assessments, our program team saw an increase in the percentage of students with good or excellent road safety knowledge from 61.4% pre-intervention to 81.4% post-intervention. Each positive outcome we achieve in classrooms is a humbling reminder of the importance of protecting our students on each journey they take on the roads. The program spotlight below features more on the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign, including key activities and our work to educate the students at Le Van Tho Primary School on helmet use, safe walking, and safe crossing. The campaign also involved a cooperative effort with partners from the government and private spheres, in support of a comprehensive E-curriculum on traffic safety to help protect students who travel to school through a diversity of transportation modes. In Cambodia, we also celebrated the government’s recent amendment of its Road Traffic Law, which increases fines for all traffic offenses nationwide, taking effect on May 1, 2020. Our team in Cambodia has consistently advocated for improved traffic enforcement of high-risk driving behaviors, including distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, and non-helmet use, and we see the government’s latest efforts as a milestone in our journey to achieving a safer road environment in the country. We view each of these achievements, whether they take place in the classroom or in government halls, as a demonstration of the clear impact we can have by working together to develop a generation of safer road users in the future. I hope you will join us in taking these moments to celebrate the successes in our lives and our work—both big and small—as we work together to invest in positive safety outcomes and futures for all. Kind regards, Mirjam Sidik
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Table of Contents |
Program Spotlight: Promoting Child Road Safety in Vietnam with Mobile Kids Campaign |
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Legislative Road Safety Milestones Passed in Cambodia |
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Employment Opportunities
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Program Spotlight: Promoting Child Road Safety in Vietnam with Mobile Kids Campaign |
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Photo of the Month: Delivering road safety education to classrooms in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
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Last year, AIP Foundation brought road safety education directly to primary school students through classroom visits with the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign. |
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In 2019, AIP Foundation launched its Mobile Kids Vietnam road safety campaign, supported by Mercedes-Benz Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City to deliver road safety education to primary school students and improve curriculum on traffic safety. |
The Mobile Kids Vietnam road safety campaign leveraged a two-pronged approach to address the unique road safety needs and environment of students. The first component centered on conducting school-based education and launching interactive classroom sessions on road safety. The second component focused on developing practical road safety content for a new traffic safety E-curriculum for students in Vietnam. Early in 2019, the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign was launched at Le Van Tho Primary School, with over 900 primary school students and 60 teachers and staff. Le Van Tho Primary School was selected for the road safety campaign due to its location on a heavily congested road without adequate pedestrian infrastructure or sidewalks for students, leaving them vulnerable on their way to and from school. |
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Delivering Road Safety Education to Classrooms
In consideration of this road environment, the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign centered its school-based education on safe walking and safe crossing strategies for students, including basic traffic signals and road rules for being a safe pedestrian. The educational road sessions also focused on helmet knowledge, including its proper use and importance, as many of the primary school students at Le Van Tho Primary School were transported every day to school via their parents’ motorcycle. Each of these topics was specially taught through games, interactive exercises, and simulations, leveraging what is known as an “edutainment” approach, combining “education” with “entertainment.” This approach to promoting students’ awareness of road safety topics ensures that lessons are enjoyable, increasing the likelihood that the children will retain key information and apply it while traveling outside of the classroom on the roads. |
During a series of over 20 educational classroom sessions held at Le Van Tho Primary School, students learned about road safety through interactive examples of real-life situations around schools. School zone mock-ups were installed in classrooms so that students could engage in the traffic simulations in a fun and memorable way. Educational booklets designed to reinforce road safety education were also attached to pencil cases and distributed to students. The primary school students also engaged with the campaign’s Moki mascot, who energized students during the classroom sessions and encouraged them to learn more about the road safety messages. Volunteers from Mercedes-Benz Vietnam also helped deliver road safety materials with messages on staying safe on the road and shared simple ways for the students to share these lessons with their parents and family members. Leveraging the influence of positive peer-to-peer education, the campaign also selected students in each class to serve as a road safety ambassador. These student ambassadors have the responsibility to uphold key road safety lessons learned through the campaign and to remind peers in their schools and communities of the importance of road safety. Following the classroom sessions on road safety and reinforcement of the education by their teachers, the students at Le Van Tho Primary School demonstrated significant improvements in their overall road safety knowledge, with an increase in the percentage of students with good or excellent road safety knowledge from 61.4% pre-intervention to 81.4% post-intervention. These outcomes also included an increase in the percentage of students with good or excellent helmet-wearing knowledge from 63.6% to 84.4% and of safe walking from 66.5% to 78.5% from pre-intervention to post-intervention, demonstrating the positive impact of the educational classroom trainings and road safety resources distributed. |
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Improving Education and Curriculum on Traffic Safety
Over the past year, the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign also developed 2 lessons on Bus and Train Safety and Boat Safety, as part of a comprehensive 10-lesson Traffic Safety E-curriculum. This innovative E-curriculum, supported by Mercedes-Benz Vietnam with the sponsorship of the Botnar Child Road Safety Challenge and management of the Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP), will be used to educate students to ensure they have the knowledge to travel safely during their journeys to and from school. Since 2008 in Vietnam, road safety education had been integrated into the curriculum for primary students across several subjects at school, including natural sciences and ethics. Legislation in Vietnam, under Resolution 12/NQ-CP, issued by the Ministry of Education and Training, also requires all schools to implement traffic safety education as a mandatory subject. Despite the government support behind the incorporation of road safety in its classrooms, educators in the country continued to face challenges in launching lessons in their classrooms, due to the lack of standardized materials, guidelines, and available teaching time. |
In response to the challenges that Vietnam’s educators have consistently faced in promoting road safety knowledge among their students, relevant stakeholders and partners in the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign joined together to develop a comprehensive E-curriculum on road safety to ensure students and teachers could access educational content through a user-friendly interface. Top experts in traffic safety, representing both the government and non-government sectors in Vietnam, joined together to develop and review the curriculum materials. The E-curriculum that emerged from several rounds of discussion, feedback, and revision by experts and road safety representatives, centers on 10 key topics: The Road to School, Safe Walking and Crossing Zones, Bike Safety, Motorcycle Safety, Car Safety, Bus and Train Safety, Boat Safety, Road Signs, Road Crash Consequences, Avoiding Road Crashes. With the support of Mercedes-Benz Vietnam, the Mobile Kids Vietnam campaign funded the design and content of the lessons on Bus and Train Safety and on Boat Safety, ensuring the content of the E-curriculum was inclusive and could effectively educate students who rely on a diversity of transportation modes to get to school each day. The E-curriculum will be piloted in a select number of participating schools, as partners and stakeholders advocate for its national dissemination to increase the traffic safety knowledge of students across Vietnam. |
Legislative Road Safety Milestones Passed in Cambodia |
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Passage of Increased Fines for Road Traffic Laws in Cambodia in Effect May 2020
The Cambodian government recently amended its Sub-Decree on Fines on Road Traffic Offenses, taking effect May 1, 2020. The amendment increases traffic fines by three to five times their previous amounts for offenses such as failure to wear a helmet, speeding, ignoring traffic signs, failing a sobriety test, and using a mobile phone while driving, among other violations. Police records during the first 31 days of the enforcement of the amended sub-decree reveal that hand-held mobile phone use accounted for over 1% of issued fines on motorcyclists, and over 8.6% of fines on four-wheeled vehicle drivers. To enforce the updated laws, the government has trained 3,919 police personnel on the new regulations. AIP Foundation has been a strong advocate for stricter traffic laws and enforcement in Cambodia, where it has launched several road safety interventions targeting high-risk road behaviors. Since 2017, the organization’s Safety Delivered program has focused on addressing mobile phone use, helmets, speeding, seatbelts, and drink driving, including a series of street-based awareness campaigns in partnership with the Cambodia Traffic Police and with university students serving as Youth Ambassadors for Road Safety. AIP Foundation continues to support efforts to improve traffic enforcement and legislation in Cambodia, including working with the National Road Safety Committee to discuss action plans for decreasing road fatalities nationwide, engaging traffic police in our road safety activities with students, and training university educators on the importance of improving youth driving behaviors. |
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