Shocking study: SA child road deaths double world average

Published Jul 11, 2018

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Pretoria - Children under the age of 18 are twice as likely

to be killed on South African roads as any other part of the world.

This is according to Aliasgher Janmohammed, project manager

for the Prevention of Injuries Impacting Children in South Africa, a UNICEF

project managed by Childsafe in collaboration with the University of Cape Town.

“It's truly disturbing that our children are being killed on

our roads like this,” he remarked during his presentation: Analysing Road

Fatalities Impacting Children aged 0-17 In The Case of Gauteng: A Three-Year

Analysis during the 2018 Southern African Transport Conference (SATC), which

is taking place at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria this

week.

Elaborating on the findings, he said children are at risk as a

result of their comparatively reduced cognitive abilities. “When children cross

roads in South Africa, they do not look out for traffic. And when they do, it’s

often in the wrong direction,” he said.

Janmohammed said that in South Africa children frequently

used the roads alone.“Children in South Africa play and interact with friends

in the road, in a country with one of the highest road fatality rates in the

world.”

He explained that many children in South Africa walk to

access education, public transport or to return home. Findings on access to

education indicated that 62% of children took longer than 15 minutes to get to

school, meaning that children in South Africa spend a lot of time on the roads which increases their chances of being killed on them.

He stated that males are three to four times more likely to

be killed on the road than females. Therefore, areas with greater male

populations are considered especially high-risk areas.

Analysis of road fatality data for Gauteng suggests that

children aged 0 - 17 years constituted seven percent of all road fatalities between 2015

and 2017. Over the three-year period of the analyses, the fatalities impacting

children increased by 37%. Child pedestrians constituted the majority in each

of the three years, followed by child passengers.

“Gauteng has an extremely high number of child road

fatalities - almost as much as the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal - even though

it is far smaller geographically,” Janmohammed pointed out.

The findings further suggest that Gauteng roads are becoming

more dangerous for children every year. And alarmingly, while the UN Decade of

Action for Road Safety 2020 goal is to reduce road traffic fatalities and road

injuries by 50%, South Africa’s statistics in this regard are not decreasing,

let alone halving. In fact, over the three-year period analysed, child fatality

rates in the country increased.

He explained that the majority of child road fatalities

occur during the week, although the rate of fatalities is higher over weekends.

Children are also being killed primarily after school i.e. from 1pm to 6pm.

“After-school activities are placing our children at great

risk. We need to establish what these activities are and why children are

having difficulties when using the roads.”

He said South Africa's roads needed to cater better to

pedestrian users and that the country needed localised road safety

interventions.

IOL Motoring

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