London - A scholarship to raise road safety awareness will be launched in London on Tuesday in memory of the great-granddaughter of ex-South Africa leader Nelson Mandela, who was killed last year.
Zenani Mandela, 13, died in a road accident on June 10 in South Africa after returning from a concert celebrating the start of the 2010 football World Cup.
“A crash robbed me of my daughter … I will never recover from this … but what makes this even worse is that so often road crashes are preventable,” said Zoleka Mandela, the mother of the young victim and granddaughter of Nelson Mandela.
The Zenani Mandela Scholarship will be worth around £15 000 and is part of the the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, which will be officially launched on May 11.
The scholarship, granted once a year, will allow a South African citizen to attend a two-week road safety conference in London along with 10 other people from developing countries.
The conference, organised and financed by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Foundation Scholarship Programme charity, will be attended by police and representatives from transport ministries.
“The idea is to get people going back to their countries and taking a leading role in reducing of fatalities and injuries on their roads,” Avi Silverman, the spokesman for the Decade of Action for Road Safety, told AFP.
South Africa's roads are among the most dangerous in the world. Around 40 people are killed each day on the country's roads, according to the South African transport ministry. - Sapa-AFP