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Each year road traffic injuries take the lives of 1.2 million men, women and children around the world, and seriously injure millions more. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics about 350 persons die annually in addition to more than 5000 injuries because of traffic accidents.

In addition to human suffering, traffic injuries have an economical impact; the result of the most traffic accidents are disables, particular attention should be given to these people (rehabilitation and medical care, education, and employment).

RESC "Roads and Environment Safety Center" believes that Road Safety and Environment protection depends critically for public support from individual citizens and from voluntary and other local interests.  Shared responsibility for, or wider public ownership of, road safety is a critical success factor for many of the specific policies.

In order to reduce the incidence of road accidents, especially in areas close to schools, and consequently limit the numbers of resulting deaths, injuries and disabilities, RESC performed many projects related to increasing awareness among community members and school children.

1. Increasing Traffic Awareness in West Bank Schools.

 This project aimed to increase traffic awareness among schoolchildren in the West Bank through the provision of educational sessions and the formation of Road Safety Teams in the schools that can prevent the students from being subjected to traffic accidents, especially during their arrival to and departure from school, as well as training of teachers to become trainers in road safety issues and able to form school teams.

Further more, this project aimed to publish 10000 copies of promotional aids to increase the public awareness.

This project was funded by United Nations Development Program - Program of Assistance to the Palestinian People UNDP.PAPP

Many organizations (ministry of transportation, traffic police, municipalities, NGO’s,….etc) highlighted this phenomenon through many workshops and meeting, in these workshops the negative effects of hiding the traffic signs by election materials.  However, more effects and coordination among all the concerned parties should be made to address this critical issue taking into consideration that it took municipalities many years to remove the election printed materials, which means waste of money, time and efforts.

Preparation are underway now to conduct the second round of presidential elections and the first round for municipal elections. This would mean, however, filling the streets, squares, cities, towns and camps with thousands of elections printed materials (leaflets and posters). So, increasing awareness regarding the best ways in distributing the election printed materials is considered crucial in order to keep our environment clean and to protect the public safety.

Road Safety Campaign through Fine Arts. 

 The aim of the action was to raise awareness of the target groups toward road safety issues through promoting cultural activities, the main target groups was children, and youth between the ages 12 -16 years old.

The main activities included training children in Ramallah and Salfit, using puppet shows targeting safety on roads as an issue.  Demonstrate puppet shows by children to children in different cities, train children and youth on creative writing and organize a story, song, and drawing competition addressing safety issues.  Publish up to 5 winning products.

The main impact on the targeted group (school children) was to increase their traffic awareness by using unconventional techniques (fine arts). i.e. song, drawing, writing, and puppet show. Using these techniques helped in increasing the perception of the targeted group of traffic awareness.

This project also succeeded to link traffic awareness issues to lovely cultural and artist tools, this lead to more understanding and perception of the children.

The project was designed in a way to encourage skilled children to continue their good works in addition to make other organizations and community believe in their abilities and skills.

On the other hand, five products were published: this included publishing of four stories with drawings, the stories were combination of several ones written by the children, so as to encourage as much as possible. In addition to a calendar holding drawings of children covering safety messages was designed and published and distributed out to the public in schools, youth clubs, as well to the wider community.

 To encourage skilled students more, awards were given to the winning products (story, song and drawings) in a public celebration.

This project was funded by European Commission Technical Assistance Office For the West Bank and Gaza Strip (EC).