The country has one of the world’s deadliest roads for children with more than two pupils killed daily in traffic crashes – a silent epidemic threatening to wipe out entire generations.
Picture this: The first term for the 2025 school calendar opened this week. By the time it ends three months later – early May 2025 – at least 180 school-going children will have been crashed to death. Individual news reports about some of the deaths will make it to the community radio’s evening bulletin and a brief story will run in the newspaper the following day.
It will end there. Yet, children and young people’s (5 – 18 years) fatalities on Ugandan roads are so severe that everyone should pick a mega-speaker and call for action. Statistics of children’s deaths due to traffic injuries are usually buried in the inner pages of the Uganda Police annual crime reports.
They not only offer an unpleasant reading, but they also show how road safety issues for helpless children have been relegated to the periphery. In 2023, Uganda lost 872 children due to road traffic crashes, a jump from 650 (in 2022), 600 in 2021; and 628 in 2020. This is even though schools were closed for the major parts of 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
While school days appear the most dangerous, this means that as the child is sent to buy salt, fetch water, or assist their mother in the garden, but must cross a motorised path, there are high chances that they may not return home alive. This should worry all of us.
These statistics, spread over 365 days of the year, mean that Uganda loses more than two children per day to road traffic injuries. Poorer pupils are disappointedly impacted. This is because the well-off are either chauffeured to school, someone is hired to walk them, or the school has capacity to hire a traffic man to hold the stop poster and help them cross busy streets.
Poorer children will mostly likely walk alone, be hauled four at once on a boda boda motorcycle or study from heavily congested areas, increasing chances of being hit. Uganda is not alone. Across the developing world, many young people are perishing in traffic accidents.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef ) reports that every single day, more than 600 children and young people die in road crashes annually across the world. Poorer countries account for the biggest chunk of this number due to lack of infrastructure and people must walk on dangerous roads with no pedestrian footpaths, unprotected from speeding vehicles.
The impact is immense – from promising lives cut short, cost to the family to bury the dead and treat the injured, and the emotional anguish parents and relatives go through. Most of these road deaths are very much because of recklessness as they are about poor infrastructure planning.
And they are preventable. For Uganda, one grapples with road infrastructure that lacks pedestrian space, has poor signalling and lighting, open manholes, and utter chaos and impatience on the road. I have witnessed a motor vehicle stop to give way to children to cross but reckless boda boda riders zoom past without minding what could be ahead. These end up sweeping children that attempt to cross trusting that they have the way.
Lack of pedestrian walkways means children marching to school must compete with a one-tonne truck for space. Besides, our school environs have been poorly designed allowing motorists to race nearby. This should never happen.
WHAT DO WE DO?
It is possible to eliminate or significantly reduce children’s deaths in road accidents. The first action would be mass sensitisation to motorists, cyclists, parents and teachers about how tragic this is and what role they can play to make roads safer for everyone.
We must also prioritise safety over speed and convenience. School zones should be established where speed can be limited to as low as 20km/hr. There are countries that have succeeded in eliminating school children’s road fatalities completely. One such country is Sweden. While it is rich and, therefore, can afford to implement expensive interventions, we can copy and implement the affordable ones.
For instance, the country created at least 12,600 safer pedestrian crossings with features such as bridges, flashing lights, and speed bumps. We surely have resources to implement these.
Parents should also be prepared to part withasmallfee–itcanbeaslowasShs 5,000 each per term – to pay traffic aides around schools to help their children every time they move out of school premises. Traffic police must do its work and be harsh on errant motorists.
All these suggestions will not work if we are all not disciplined enough to use roads courteously. We must care that there are other road users and be kind to everyone even if you are cruising the biggest car.
The writer curates Beep Beep (@BeepBeepUG), a social media blog dedicated to advocating children’s road safety.