Give a Vietnamese child a helmet; save a life

As the Tet holiday (Lunar New Year) approaches in Vietnam, the road safety situation is of critical importance. Traffic accidents spike around the lunar new year; traffic accidents increased by 40% between 2011 and 2012, yet the number of deaths and head injuries dropped by 38% and 50%, respectively, during this same period [1]. The prevented head injuries in the instance of a crash is largely attributable to the use of helmets. We need to ensure that our children are protected when on the roads since children’s helmet use rates are still woefully low.

Starting in September of last year, we launched a campaign in cooperation with the Ho Chi Minh City Traffic Safety Committee, to increase the enforcement of the child helmet law (Decree 34) in five target districts within Ho Chi Minh City, including District 1, Binh Thanh District, District 9, District 12, and Tan Binh District. We have observed an increase of helmet use rates from the average of 20% around Vietnam to 63.5% that we documented at one of school, Nguyen Du Primary School, in one of our target districts, District 12.

Through our ongoing public awareness campaign targeting Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, and Hanoi, AIP Foundation is displaying billboards with messages that encourage parents to protect their child’s future by placing a helmet on his or her head. These billboards are placed throughout the city and provide consistent reminders for children to wear their helmets.

AIP Foundation seeks to identify communities where a high percentage of students commute to and from school by motorbike but whose parents have difficulty affording helmets for their children. Through our Helmets for Kids projects, we hand over helmets to these students. To reinforce these messages, we train teachers in road safety education so that they can continue to teach their students about safe helmet wearing practices years after the initial helmet donation. Students receive road safety information through non-class, extracurricular activities. We also engage parents since they are a critical decision maker in whether or not a child wears a helmet. In January alone, over 3,000 students across Vietnam have received helmets through our programs.

We hope to be able to reach more students with our comprehensive model that provides students with quality helmets and empowers children to wear them through education, increasing public awareness, and enforcement. We seek to have more children protecting themselves against the risk of head injury and death through the simple act of putting on a helmet, around the Tet holiday and every time that children ride on a motorcycle.

June marks the end of the school year in Vietnam, requiring students and parents need to implement the road safety lessons that they have learned through the year without schools reinforcing these lessons learned. In a recent study of the school based programs in Vietnam, Helmets for Kids interventions resulted in a considerable increase in helmet use (ranging between 21% and 95% increases) across all program schools. As of May 30, 2012, nine crashes were reported where the donated helmets have saved lives of the students.  

Hearing the story of fifth grader, Nguyen Ngoc Mai Thao, reminds us why wearing a helmet is so important. Thao was being driven home from school on her older brother's motorcycle, they crashed into a fence and fell off. Thao, unconscious, was hospitalized. The doctor diagnosed a brain hematoma along with Thao's many scratches, but she is now recovering well. Her brother's chin was torn and required stitches. The doctor told Thao's mother that the helmet saved the young girl's life.

Over the summer, our public awareness campaign, “Children also need a helmet”, intensified its efforts to make its messages more widely accessible. The campaign targeted parents through various online media, including blogs, a Facebook fan page, and discussion forums. These channels were effective in providing parents with road safety information and stimulating discussion about child helmet use. The campaign's TV commercial also ran during the summer on popular television channels during primetime as well as in public hospitals and buses.  According to external media monitoring estimates, 24% of the Vietnamese population nationwide is expected to see our commercial three or more times; behavior change theory indicates that hearing a message three times impacts attitudes and behaviors on a subject.

As children returned to school in September, the campaign also kicked off its four month long enforcement campaign in Ho Chi Minh City, encouraging children to wear helmets. The enforcement plan was developed in coordination with the National Traffic Safety Committee, the WHO, and municipal road safety stakeholders, including Ho Chi Minh City Traffic Safety Committee, Traffic Police, Departments of Education and Training, Health, Information and Communications, and the Youth Union. Police activities will be accompanied by information counters set up in target districts where flyers and helmets are distributed to educate violators who are stopped by police. These enforcement efforts are being piloted in HCMC and rolled out elsewhere upon successful completion of the pilot.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for your support of the AIP Foundation.  Without you, we would not be able to provide thousands of school children with helmets, implement our national scale public awareness campaign, or collaborate with traffic police to work toward making our vision of safer roads and smarter road users a reality.