With all the excitement and eagerness to be back in class, children should remember that roads can be dangerous. When travelling in school zones, moving out of driveways and navigating through parking lots and neighbourhoods, motorists can expect to see an increase in pedestrian traffic during morning, lunch and afternoon hours as children walk or cycle to school or wait for public transport. SORSA reminds everyone to pay attention, slowdown in school zones and follow traffic rules.
Although our traffic police and other stakeholders such as SORSA, DRTS and MVA Fund continue to search for more ways to reach out to our young ones, on road safety, the statistics indicate that we have a mammoth task ahead of us. It is disheartening to know that annually, children aged under 16 years die on our roads in Botswana as passengers and pedestrians. Two hundred and thirty one (231) lives of children have been claimed by road accidents in the past five years, while 787 and 2,576 children had serious and minor injuries respectively. With all this said, it is quite evident that Botswana is faced with a serious problem, not only are children at high risk in vehicles or on bicycles, they are vulnerable as pedestrians and are often killed or injured in the simple act of walking to and from school and hence this warrants robust intervention measures by all stakeholders, that is private sector, business community, schools community, policy makers and civic society.
