Cameroon-Road Safety Campaign:CAROSAF Urges Gov’t to Put Traffic Controllers around Road Side Schools

By Christopher Ambe Shu

 The Cameroon Government, municipal councils and other concerned stakeholders have been called upon to support a project initiated by Cameroon Road safety Foundation (CAROSAF),a Buea –based NGO that advocates for road safety and high way injury prevention, so to significantly minimize roads accidents, which are reportedly on the increase

CAROSAF officials addressing journalists(not seen in picture)

The CAROSAF project dubbed “Traffic Controllers at Selected Nursery and Primary Schools” is aimed at managing traffic at high conflict areas.

 “Within the framework of this project, trained traffic controllers are stationed at selected nursery and primary school along busy roads in municipalities,” Edwin Achimbom Minang, director of CAROSAF, who made the appeal, told journalists on the eve of school resumption, in Buea.

Minang was speaking at a press conference, during which he and other  CAROSAF officials presented a report of how successful the traffic controllers’ project was last academic year in nine chosen nursery and primary schools in Fako Division, where it was first launched.

According to Minang, “This project was a major success in the 2009/2010 academic year. No incident of a child being injured or killed in a road crash was registered at any of the location where CAROSAF Traffic Controllers operated”. He said the project would continue this academic year.

He called on the government, municipal authorities and other concerned stakeholders to “actively support this project by funding the operation of traffic controllers at other locations ,”adding that, “This will support the global objective to increase and sustain action to prevent road traffic injury and death, especially those involving vulnerable groups such nursery and primary school pupils”

The director said the traffic controllers who were trained for at least a week by CAROSAF transport experts helped school children “cross roads in the vicinity of their schools at peaks periods in the morning and afternoon”.

Minang added that each month the traffic controllers were given an allowance, thanks to financial donation from some Cameroonians of goodwill that included Churchill E. Monono, Dr.Ebob Eta and Robert Tama Lisinge.

Another CAROSAF official, Robert Tama Lisinge, talking on general perspectives on road safety, said awareness is one of the easiest measures to ensure road safety. He regretted that, each year world-wide over 1.2 million people die as a result of road crashes and about 50 million are injured.

Southwest Regional Delegate for Transport, Arthur Ekeke Lisinge, who attended the press conference, lauded CAROSAF for assisting the Government in the promotion of road safety. He said Government is doing much to promote road safety.

“I’m happy that NGO’s such as CAROSAF have come in to help ensure road safety”, he remarked, stressing that road safety should be the preoccupation of everybody.

Courtesy: The Recorder Newspaper, Cameroon, of September 16, 2010