Introduction

Given its relative stability and growth in recent years, Cambodia has seen a rapid increase in the volume of road traffic. At the same time, there has been a rapidly rising number of road accidents. Providing road safety education (RSE) to school students is one of the strategies to address this trend.

In 2007, an educational consultancy company from New Zealand, Educating NZ was funded by NZAID to develop a road safety education programme for the Cambodian Ministry of Education Youth and Sport (MoEYS). Educating NZ selected Handicap International Belgium (HIB) as its in-country project partner.

The RSE project

Educating NZ worked with HIB and local stakeholders to develop a RSE programme for Grades 7-9. The initial outcome was a matrix of learning outcomes identifying what students at those levels should be expected to know. The team then developed a teacher handbook providing lesson plans designed to achieve those learning outcomes, and a student resource book containing attractive engaging materials for students.

In collaboration with HIB and MoEYS, Educating NZ also developed and delivered a training programme and teaching materials for educators to learn how to teach RSE in an interactive way. A ‘train the trainers’ model was used, where Educating NZ trained a group of national trainers and then accompanied them to the four pilot provinces to support them as they delivered training to teachers, traffic police and officials.

The RSE programme was piloted in four provinces with high rates of road injuries: Phnom Penh, Siem Riep, Kampong Speu and Battambang.

Evaluation of the TSE programme

Earlier this year, Educating NZ returned to Cambodia to help design project monitoring and evaluation, provide training to the monitoring and evaluation team, and to lead the evaluation of the project.

During the evaluation process, stakeholders identified gains in knowledge and skills including the:

• general increase in knowledge of traffic signs and traffic law among students and their teachers
• transfer of traffic knowledge to local level
• experience gained in developing the curriculum
• introduction of interactive teaching techniques
• demonstration of how to teach practical road safety skills during the training
• sharing of pedagogical knowledge and RSE experience by the Educating NZ team
• evaluation and monitoring skills shared by the Educating NZ team.

They identified important achievements, including the:

• positive collaboration between stakeholders particularly for MoEYS with Ministry of the Interior and the National Road safety Committee
• involvement of officials at both national and local levels
• demonstration of how to lead a project of this kind
• modeling of how to design, organise and lead the training workshop
• importance of an evaluation process designed to discover problems so that future roll out can address as many as possible and thereby be strengthened
• leadership of the team
• ability to solve problems immediately and on time.

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