Pretoria - Children under the age of 18 are twice as likely
to be killed on South African roads as any other part of the world.
This is according to Aliasgher Janmohammed, project manager
for the Prevention of Injuries Impacting Children in South Africa, a UNICEF
project managed by Childsafe in collaboration with the University of Cape Town.
“It's truly disturbing that our children are being killed on
our roads like this,” he remarked during his presentation: Analysing Road
Fatalities Impacting Children aged 0-17 In The Case of Gauteng: A Three-Year
Analysis during the 2018 Southern African Transport Conference (SATC), which
is taking place at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria this
week.
Elaborating on the findings, he said children are at risk as a
result of their comparatively reduced cognitive abilities. “When children cross
roads in South Africa, they do not look out for traffic. And when they do, it’s
often in the wrong direction,” he said.
Janmohammed said that in South Africa children frequently
used the roads alone.“Children in South Africa play and interact with friends
in the road, in a country with one of the highest road fatality rates in the
world.”
He explained that many children in South Africa walk to
access education, public transport or to return home. Findings on access to
education indicated that 62% of children took longer than 15 minutes to get to
school, meaning that children in South Africa spend a lot of time on the roads which increases their chances of being killed on them.
He stated that males are three to four times more likely to
be killed on the road than females. Therefore, areas with greater male
populations are considered especially high-risk areas.
Analysis of road fatality data for Gauteng suggests that
children aged 0 - 17 years constituted seven percent of all road fatalities between 2015
and 2017. Over the three-year period of the analyses, the fatalities impacting
children increased by 37%. Child pedestrians constituted the majority in each
of the three years, followed by child passengers.
“Gauteng has an extremely high number of child road
fatalities - almost as much as the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal - even though
it is far smaller geographically,” Janmohammed pointed out.
The findings further suggest that Gauteng roads are becoming
more dangerous for children every year. And alarmingly, while the UN Decade of
Action for Road Safety 2020 goal is to reduce road traffic fatalities and road
injuries by 50%, South Africa’s statistics in this regard are not decreasing,
let alone halving. In fact, over the three-year period analysed, child fatality
rates in the country increased.
He explained that the majority of child road fatalities
occur during the week, although the rate of fatalities is higher over weekends.
Children are also being killed primarily after school i.e. from 1pm to 6pm.
“After-school activities are placing our children at great
risk. We need to establish what these activities are and why children are
having difficulties when using the roads.”
He said South Africa's roads needed to cater better to
pedestrian users and that the country needed localised road safety
interventions.