In October 2016, EASST and our Kazakh Partner, Common Road, spent a week in Aktobe and the nearby Martuk Villages promoting the EASST Road Safety Education Pack to children and schools exposed to road risk along the EBRD financed section of South West Corridor Road.
Following on from the successful summer project which ran Safe Villages projects for the Martuk villagers, Emily Carr from EASST and Arsen Shakuov from Common Road, returned to provide road safety training to children at risk along the new road and to promote wider use of the EASST Education Pack.
Children are amongst the most vulnerable road users. They are less able to recognise dangerous situations and they are physically smaller which means they can be unseen by drivers, and more likely to be injured by an impact. Indeed, in the first six months of 2016, 32 per cent of road crashes in the Martuk district involved children.
With this in mind and with the support of the EBRD Special Shareholders fund, over 500 children from pre-school to high school were trained during the week in road safety.
The training used resources from the new EASST Education Pack which is published in Kazakh and Russian. The Pack provides flexible resources for teaching road safety in a fun age-appropriate way for children up to 14 years old and focuses on the specific road risks in lower and middle-income countries.
Every school visit involved lively and interactive sessions including discussion, role play, colouring, quizzes, games and other activities. Each session was not only an opportunity to train the children but a chance for teachers to observe the teaching methods.
All the schools were given copies of the Education Pack to keep and they committed to using them for future road safety teaching.
In addition, meetings were held with the local Education Department, who have agreed to promote the Pack to schools across the region and host an online version so that all their schools can access the resources.
The local Police were also keen to support the project and have committed to promote the Pack to their Juvenile Officers who lead on safety work in schools.
Common Road were delighted with the success of the week and now plan to continue to work with the Police across the Aktobe region to ensure wide use of the Education Pack, as well as looking at how the project can be replicated in Astana and Almaty.
EASST would like to thank the EBRD Special Shareholders Fund for its support of this work as part of the EBRD’s South West Corridor Road Rehabilitation project.
