Dr Boboye Oyeyemi
By Ibironke Ariyo
The Federal Government has expressed determination to put appropriate structures in place to mitigate child road mortality.
The Corps Marshal, Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), Dr Boboye Oyeyemi said this at the stakeholders workshop on child road safety strategy for Nigeria on Wednesday in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was jointly organised by FRSC and World Bank for stakeholders to deliberate on the use of roads.
The gathering offers great opportunity for the improvement of existing strategies as well as re-modelling some approaches to meet domestic and international expectations on child road safety.
Oyeyemi said that the Corps had in the last three decades sustained its emphasis on stategies, programmes and processing aimed at reducing the number of children killed or injured on Nigerian roads.
He said that the focus had been to consistently reduce exposure to mobility risk through dedicated measures that were cross-cutting, impactful and evidence-based.
He added that the Corps had specifically pursued child road safety through deliberate and targeted policy thrust and well cut out implementation guidelines.
In the series of interface with the World Bank and other development partners, some gaps were observed thus, necessitating the inclusion of the child road safety strategy in the reviewed Nigeria Road Safety Strategy II (NRSSII).
The identified concerns generated a new wave of engagements between representatives of World Bank and the Corps aimed at harnessing existing gains to secure greater fortunes in the promotion of child Safety Strategy in Nigeria.
We anticipate the final approval of the documents from Federal Executive Council (FEC).
No doubt, with the inclusion the child road safety strategy in NRSS II document, the stage is set for a more comprehensive approach that is expected to yield higher dividends, he said.
Oyeyemi noted that the global burden of disease study estimates that road traffic injury was the cause of death for children ages 5 to 14 years in Nigeria and 10th highest cause of disability.
He noted that World Health Organisation (WHO) had in 2018 said that road traffic injuries were currently the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5 to 29 years.
It was also estimated that in 2017, this figure must have caused Nigeria about .8 billion. Statistics from FRSC data base shows that between 2015 and 2019, 9, 809 children suffered various degrees of injuries from 1, 884 road traffic crashes (RTCs), he said.
The President, Fire Officers Wives Association, (FOWA), Mrs Larai Liman, said that the inclusion of child road Safety Strategy in the NRSS II would go a long way in addressing the problems with children.
Liman noted that most schools where built on the highway and had no signs to show that children were within such areas, saying that such had led to death of many children.
She said that most times the children used the road by themselves thereby causing more harm than good as nobody was there to help them cross the roads.
I will advise schools to ensure that they put road signs for children in order to help them avoid cars and stay off road accidents, she said.
Source: NAN News