Cameroon:CAROSAF To Remember Traffic Victims In Special Way

By Christopher Ambe Shu

Cameroon Roadsafety Foundation (CAROSAF), a Buea –based NGO that advocate’s road safety and high way injury prevention, will join many  other road safety advocates to celebrate this year’s World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, come November 21, in grand style,it has emerged.



Achimbom Minang



 The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (approved by the United Nations Organization) is observed on the third Sunday of November each year worldwide.

Edwin Achimbom Minang, director of CAROSAF, today in a briefing with The Recorder ahead of the celebration proper, said his NGO is planning to organize several road safety- awareness activities to that effect.

Minang said the celebration will be under the theme “We Support a Decade of Action for Road Safety:2010-2020”

He said these activities will include: a demonstration of various road safety placards at different points on the major highways in Fako division of Fako Division of Cameroon, where CAROSAF activities so far have had a greater impact; distribution of road safety guides and gadgets; testimonies from highway drivers who have been involved in road accidents and the placement of CAROSAF bill board carrying road safety messages at popular road junctions such as Buea (Mile 17)Motor Park; visits to road crash victims in chosen hospitals.

Achimbom Minang said the activities are just coming to complement what CAROSAF has been doing to ensure road safety.

 The NGO is currently running a traffic controllers’ project to help cross school children in high traffic areas.

According to Achimbom 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 had even urged the Cameroon 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”

 Robert Tama Lisinge, a CAROSAF official and UN staff abroad while in Cameroon recently, regretted that, each year world-wide over 1.2 million people die as a result of road crashes and about 50 million are injured.

 Achimbom Minang,CAROSAF director,regetted  that since 2005 when the UN approved the Day of Remembrance, “Cameroon- a UN member-state and listed as one of the countries with a high rate of road traffic accidents, is yet to organize any national activity in this regard.”