The Caravane Project has been, perhaps one of the most ambitious road safety projects through West Africa. Championed by the European Commission (Youth in Action) building fruitful collaborations with Africa, the Caravane took 50 youth leaders from across 7 U.E.M.O.A countries delivering a message of road safety to thousands of youth.
We supported the project and helped kick off the programme in Niger, where we trained the youth leaders delivering the project on peer education, advocacy and helped them write the African Youth Declaration for Road Safety. Equipped with road safety demonstrations, talks, petitions and meetings with high-level country officials, the Caravane spread a message of road safety awareness amongst hundreds and thousands of youth.
President of the Caravane Project
The Caravane Project was initiated by Responsible Young Drivers (Belgium) and funded by the European Commission's Youth in Action programme. The mission was to build solid cooperation and partnership building between European and African youth for a common goal. We were approached by RYD to bring our skills in workshop delivery, advocacy, declaration making and media branding to join the project as consultancy partners.
The project brought together numerous national NGOs for road safety from 7 U.E.M.O.A countries including, Niger, Mali, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Senegal. Each NGO in the country had a long standing involvement in our youth network and we worked together in this partnership to offer the skills and knowledge needed to maximize outreach as the Caravane travelled through each country bringing a road safety message.
Our role in the Caravane Project was to bring an international perspective as well as offer the African youth leaders a chance to build their skills on key areas that would needed while they would be out on the Caravane journey. Some of our objectives in this project included:
As part of supporting the project, we edited the following video to offer our African Youth a video record of their incredible Caravane journey. See what the Caravane was all about, what happened and the impact it created:
The Caravane succesfully delivered its mission to bring road safety awareness amongst youth in 7 countries in West Africa. It is noted that hundreds and thousands of young people attended rallies, events, festivals, presentations, demostrations and other events all created by each NGO as the Caravane entered the country.
The official report stated that over 150,000 young people were reached through this project with a focus on raising awareness on helmets, drinking driving, distracted driving, seatbelts and helmets through a range of interactive demonstrations as well as advocating for the African Youth Declaration for Road Safety. In every country, the African Youth Declaration was received by high-level officials and leaders listened to what the youth had to say about road safety.