African nonprofit is making the walk to school dramatically safer for students

Due to a lack of traffic lights, signs, and sidewalks in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the streets can be dangerous for anyone on foot.

Children are especially vulnerable; the World Health Organization reports that kids in sub-Saharan Africa are more than twice as likely to die in a road accident than anywhere else. The nonprofit SARSAI aims to change this by finding schools with the highest rates of death and injuries, and then improving road conditions in the area. This includes installing speed bumps, crosswalks, and traffic signs, with educators also going into the schools to teach kids about street safety. In Dar es Salaam, 38,000 students so far have benefited from SARSAI's work.

SARSAI, which stands for School Area Road Safety Assessments and Improvements, is already seeing results; at schools where eight to 12 kids were killed or injured in previous years, SARSAI interventions have reduced injuries by 26 percent. "What SARSAI does is to look at our cities from the angle of the child pedestrian," program director Ayikai Charlotte Poswayo said. "If we can design our cities from that angle, we would be designing it for the safety and security of all."

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Last week, SARSAI received the inaugural World Resources Institute Ross Prize for Cities. SARSAI is already working in nine African cities, and with this $250,000 prize, the organization will be able to bring its safety program to even more places. Catherine Garcia