Youth empowerment at multiple levels...

Our work in Oman has primarily partnered with the government of the Sultanate of Oman and its associated ministries including Brand Oman and Youth Ministry. For the 36 Middle-Eastern Youth Assembly, young people from 24 countries gathered in Muscat to talk about youth and road safety issues in their region as well as be trained on some key road safety topics. The event was sponsored by the Sultanate of Oman and organized in partnership with us.

The Muscat Youth Summit, organized by Brand Oman along with a steering group of delivery partners brought together hundreds of young people across the country to experience a range of youth development issues through interactive workshops. We ran a stand alone workshop on road safety at this summit with 35 young participants.

Following on from the Summit, we organized a Training of Facilitators in Muscat, Oman with a local NGO to empower a group of young leaders who went on to train others in road safety.

Targeted road safety action...

In Oman, we ran several workshops to empower youth. In the Training of Facilitators, the objectives were in line with our overall programme:

Increase young people´s understanding of road safety, and youth-related issues in Oman;
Inspire and motivate young men and women to become actively involved in preventing road traffic injuries;
Build the knowledge and develop the skills of Omani youth leaders in order for them to implement their own road safety activities.

In our stand alone session at the Muscat Youth Summit, young people had the opportunity to grasp road safety issues from a wider global context as the summit brought together young people from all around the world:

Increase participants' understanding of the road safety crisis facing young people globally;
Increase participant's understanding of why young people are at risk of road crashes;
Give participants a taster of two key risk factors: seatbelts and distracted driving and increase their awareness of the issues.

Road safety education reinvented

It's no secret that young people experience life differently to their parents and the older generations, so then why do so many workshops assume that young people want to sit through an old school style of learning? We've experienced it ourselves, sitting through hours of presentations, speech after speech and talk after talk. If we really want to engage with young people, we know this is not the way! Therefore YOURS is using a highly interactive and enagaging methodology while delivering workshops.

In Belize, we worked with our local partners to select the most approriate road safety topics relevant to the lives of young people but also reflective of the road safety situation in the country, based on official statistics. All topics are facilitated by our master trainers who bring their years of experience to make road safety topics accessible, engaging and fun.

The topics covered in the Oman programme included:

Facilitation Skills
Peer Education
Fundamentals of Human Learning
Scope of the Road Safety Problem Internationally and in Belize
Youth and Road Traffic Injuries
How Crashes Happen
Key Risk Factors in Road Safety: Speeding, Drink and Drug Driving, Seatbelts and Distracted Driving
Gender impacts; roles; stereotypes; and masculinities and masculine behaviour on roads
Communication and Public Speaking Skills
Team and Trust Building
Project Cycle - Developing a Road Safety Project
Developing a Youth and Road Safety Workshop
Evaluation methods