Demo project deep-dive: Protecting Zambia's Children on the Road to School
- Jun 16
- 3 min read
Every morning, hundreds of thousands of children across African cities embark on a risky journey to school. They walk to school along roads engineered for vehicles, through neighborhoods where safe speed limits are not enforced. In 2024, Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, alone accounted for over half of all recorded road traffic accidents in the country, with more than 19,000 incidents in a single year (RTSA, 2024). In 2025, national figures recorded 1,310 child casualties and 201 child fatalities on Zambian roads (RTSA, 2025).
Trans-Safe designed and implemented living labs in Lusaka to address this topic. A new paper presented at the 3rd AfroSAFE Conference (University of Zambia, Lusaka, June 2026) by Chilekwa O'Brien of the Zambia Road Safety Trust proved how a coordinated, evidence-based Safe System intervention can actually change these outcomes at the school level through interventions at 15 sites around schools.
A safer journey to school through safe systems
The "Safer Journeys to School" initiative, implemented across 15 high-risk school zones in Lusaka, was built around three mutually reinforcing components:
Safe speeds: Low-cost but high-impact "safe road furniture" was installed at each site: zebra crossings, speed humps, and signage establishing 30 km/h school zones. The goal was to bring each corridor to a minimum 3-star iRAP safety rating, a globally recognised pedestrian infrastructure benchmark.
Safe road users: an awareness campaign that reached over 24,000 primary school students through a five-session standardised road safety curriculum. Sessions covered practical skills like hazard spotting, the "Stop, Look, Listen, Think" principle, and understanding traffic signs.
Community Ownership and Data Systems: Fifteen School Safety Committees were established alongside peer-led "Road Safety Champions" clubs, ensuring that communities themselves became the custodians of their own safer zones. The Living Lab model added a digital layer with corridor profiles and smart monitoring technology that track how traffic and pedestrians actually interact over time.
Results of the Lusaka living lab
The results reported across all 15 sites are quantifiable:
Vehicle speeds fell by over 30% within the newly designated school zones, which leads to a direct reduction in the severity of any collision that might occur.
Unsafe road-crossing behaviours dropped by 20% among students, as measured through structured observation before and after the intervention.
Road safety knowledge scores improved by an average of 80% among the 24,000 participating students.
All 15 school zones achieved the minimum 3-star iRAP pedestrian safety rating, and all 15 School Safety Committees are now active.
The relationship between vehicle speed and pedestrian fatality risk is well established: a child struck at 50 km/h faces a dramatically higher chance of death than one struck at 30 km/h. A 30% speed reduction in school zones is a considerable success.
Lessons learned for other African cities
The TRANS-SAFE project works on transforming road safety in Africa through reforms across all safe systems pillars. Children, women, and people with disabilities face the greatest exposure to road danger, and protecting the most vulnerable road users will lead to the protection of all road users.
The Lusaka study demonstrates several things that other cities can learn from, including community-led approaches, improving the use of data to enforce safe speeds, and optimizing low-cost interventions to maximize road safety benefits.
A localized, community-centric Safe System approach can substantially reduce exposure and risk for child pedestrians in high-risk urban school zones. The challenge now is replication, institutionalization, and policy change, scaling pilots to policies and frameworks that inform how cities design, fund, and govern their roads.
Read the Full Paper
Chilekwa O'Brien & TRANS-SAFE (2026). Safe System Intervention in Lusaka School Zones: Quantified Results from 15 Pilot Sites. 3rd AfroSAFE Conference, University of Zambia, Lusaka. www.ictct.net/afrosafe/2026-zambia