Selling Safety: Marketing Road Safety in South Africa

The World Health Organisation recently declared road accidents an international health priority. Road accidents kill about 1 million people every year. This disproportionately affects developing and transition countries. According to this paper, South Africa has an abysmal road safety record with an average of 10, 000 people killed and 150.000 people injured on South African roads annually.

The author posits that Entertainment-Education initiatives have been effective in promoting social change in South Africa. As examples, he presents the Soul City and Soul Buddyz evaluations as showing promising results from their ongoing E-E series. An argument for the need for more focus to be put on Road Safety in EE is presented. Included is a discussion of the potential role of a new media format in penetrating into populations hitherto hard to reach.

A current project using “action kits” with behavioural triggers for learner drivers is discussed. This project uses different media such as Internet, CD ROMs, Email notifications and SMS technologies to promote a pilot road safety brand. If successful, the author suggests that this “action kit” concept could be further developed and rolled out at the provincial level to reach a large number of learner drivers.

This paper attempts to consider the context of South Africa while maintaining distance from the technical and political considerations which, while necessary, often "doom projects to obscurity."