Imperial Road Safety recently announced that they have successfully educated pupils from 1 000 schools nationwide about safe road usage. In these schools, about one million learners learned how to use the road safely through programmes sanctioned by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) aimed at generating awareness about pupil pedestrians.

The programme taught these pupils the fundamentals of proactive road safety and provided them with reflective sashes. These sashes have been made a mandatory part of pupil school uniforms by the DBE.

Angie Motshekga, Minister of Basic Education thanked all parties for their contributions to the schools and road safety programmes.

“For the participants’ sterling efforts and commitment to the learners, the department extends its utmost gratitude to you,” she said.

“We recognise the strength and value of effective partnerships in contributing to the improvement of quality education.”

The Safe Scholars Programme is an extension of Imperial Road Safety’s Scholar Patrol Improvement Project.

The programme only set out to reach about 300 schools in 2015, but it has since grown beyond all expectations, quadrupling in size and reaching a total of 1039 schools and 1 026 985 learners. The company also distributed 43 850 sashes.

“We are proud of the progress the programme has made and believe that, through collaboration with companies such as Imperial, we will be able to witness even further growth in a programme that is a fundamental pillar for enhanced road safety for our future leaders,” Angie said.

“We were overwhelmed by the astounding success of this programme and believe that without government’s endorsement, we would not be in this position today. It is with this in mind that we were very proud to hand over a certificate of commemoration to the Honourable Angie Motshekga.

In addition, we believe that this type of outreach is a critical pillar in our efforts towards educating children, at grass-root level, about the importance of road safety – especially for those children who walk to and from school each day,” said a representative of the Imperial Road Safety programme.

“With almost 40 per cent of road deaths in South Africa being pedestrian-related, there is no doubt that this milestone is an important one for the country.”

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