The School Area Road Safety Assessments and Improvements (SARSAI) programme, run by NGO Amend, is the first road safety programme of any type proven to reduce road traffic injuries among children in sub-Saharan Africa. The simple, data-driven approach has been replicated in more than 50 school areas in nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

Violent road crashes are the leading cause of child death over the age of five and a child in sub-Saharan Africa is twice as likely to die in a road crash as a child in any other region of the world, despite being home to just 2% of the global vehicle fleet.

The SARSAI programme identifies schools where the surrounding road infrastructure puts schoolchildren and all road users at risk. At these high-risk schools, the SARSAI programme systematically assesses the area to identify measures to improve road safety, makes the case to the local government and demonstrates how to implement them. Streets are re-shaped, introducing footpaths and traffic-calmed crossings, creating space specifically for pedestrians, changing behaviours, and reducing vehicle speeds. The costs are low, at around $25,000 USD per school area, and eminently feasible; it takes just days to implement basic infrastructure such as signs, sidewalks, and speed humps once government approvals have been granted (which can however be time consuming). What is most remarkable though are the results: reduced injury rates by as much as 26%.

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, those challenges are keenly felt. When the SARSAI project began assessing the city, it discovered that half of the 360 government-run schools registered at least one pupil injury each year, but at the 22 most high-risk schools more than 1% of their pupils were injured or killed each year.

SARSAI was the recipient of the inaugural World Resources Institute (WRI) Ross Prize for Cities, donated by philanthropist Stephen M. Ross, recognised for its ‘affordable, life-saving and scalable’ interventions and is part of the Foundation’s Child Health Initiative Toolkit.