Total Ethiopia invested 1.3 million birr to provide road safety cube materials to be distributed to primary and elementary schools in and around Addis Ababa in the presence of Dagmawit Moges, Minister of Transport and Mulu Gebregziabher, State Minister of Transport.
The cubes will be distributed to children at elementary schools in order to help them take precaution against road traffic accidents.
Road safety cube is a tool whose objective is to help in deploying a road safety awareness campaign for children in school and support the actions to minimize road accidents.
The project is said to be Part of the social responsibility of Total Ethiopia and in collaboration with the concerned stakeholders.
Total has prepared 36 safety cubes to distribute to primary and elementary schools located in the risk zones of Addis Ababa and Oromia region located around Addis Ababa.
On February 14, 2020 Addis Ababa Education Bureau received 10 safety cubes and Oromia Education Bureau received eight safety cubes. Beside the education bureaus, other stakeholders working on the road safety issues including World Vision Ethiopia and Plan International also received the safety cubes.
“The program will help to emphasis awareness of children’s and youngsters about the danger on the road as well as to help them acquire the understanding about road safety rules and regulations with visual identities” said Hayleyesus Assefa, Corporate Communication and Social Responsibilities Director of Total Ethiopia.
This safety cubes will also be used as reference and teaching aid in the primary elementary schools. With this 36 safety cubes more than 7,200 students are expected to be trained.
10 of the 36 safety cubes are English version imported by Total Ethiopia to scale up the project and the rest 26 are made locally in Amharic.
Total Ethiopia is working to minimize road accident in the country. Total has installed dual on board camera computer on trucks. According to Hayleyesus, there are around 600 trucks in total.
“Even if the installation is expensive, Total gives more attention to human lives,” said Thibault Lesueur, Managing Director of Total.
On February 5,2020 Total has celebrate two years of anniversary of “Zero Death Accident”, which in the stated period trucks of Total were not involved in death to a human life.
“Every sector of the country should take such kind of experiences as example to minimize the rising number of road accidents in our country,” the MD added.
Reports shows that Ethiopia loss tens of thousands of lives due to road accident and millions victims directly and indirectly from the accidents. Lack of road safety education, unfavorable traffic condition and speed are some of the reasons for the high traffic accident in Ethiopia.