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Youths And Road Safety
Fri, November 21, 2014
2,000 Belizean youths are expected to benefit from the Road Safety for Belizean Youth Project. The main objective of the project is to train these youths on driving risks and road safety measures.

They're a key demographic because persons aged between 16 and 29 account for 30% of road traffic fatalities. That's a highly disproportional figure, and president of the Belizean Youth for Road Safety explained how this project can considerably decrease this figure.

Eric Sanchez, President, Belizean Youth Road Safety
"The idea is to try to reach 2,000 youths and we were given a specific timeframe for that and that is why we are doing the training over at the high schools and we did a training at the 6th forms, so what we want to do now with these amount of individuals, it's just going to accumulate for us and with that we would be able to reach our 2,000 maximum. With a presentation to the President of the CDB, we would be able to hopefully garner the trust and support in that we are doing the right thing and that we are making the positive step towards the development and the proper rearing of our country. We have been doing trainings for about 2 months and I must say we have reach almost a half of that and we have about one year plus more to go, so I think in terms of reaching 2,000 youths its very practical. Our training structure is more of a facilitating type workshop, we don't go and just regurgitate information; we go and try to instill, we try to do it in a very professional, very young, fun innovative way."

Dr. William Warren Smith, President, CDB
"The objective is to reduce fatalities on the roads so that a very important component of that exercise is building awareness. What today is all about is to get an idea of the very important role that the young people of Belize are playing in trying to build that awareness. There are number of other such developments that are part and parcel of the project, so it's an infrastructure project combine with a very critical awareness component."

After the launch today Dr. Smith was taken to the CDB funded Mental Health Clinic and the Buttonwood Bay drainage project. For the Youth Road Safety Project CDB has granted a loan of $7.248 million US dollars while the Government is contributing about $1.6 million US dollars. The Road Safety Youth group have reached out to 823 youths so far and have until next year to meet their 2,000 youth mark.

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