Every day, more than 1,600 children and adolescents lose their lives to preventable injuries across the globe. For millions of learners navigating under-resourced neighbourhoods, securing safe journeys to school remains an urgent daily challenge. The daily commute should be a predictable pathway toward education, opportunity, and personal growth. Instead, it presents a perilous trifecta of threats: road traffic collisions, open-water drowning hazards, and exposure to interpersonal or community violence. These risks are compounded by persistent systemic inequities, leaving young pedestrians and cyclists bearing a disproportionate burden without adequate protective infrastructure.
To confront these intersecting dangers head-on, ChildSafe South Africa joined hands with Safe Kids Worldwide at the Safety 2026 conference in Cape Town to host a high-level workshop titled “Ubuntu in Action: Advancing Safe Journeys to School Across Road Traffic, Open Water, and Violence”. Opening the session, Zaitoon Rabaney, Executive Director of ChildSafe South Africa, set a firm tone by examining the harsh daily realities confronting learners. Pride Jumbo of AMEND’s Safe Schools Africa presented frontline evidence on the imperative of speed management and child-focused road modifications. Dr Zaynab Essack from the Human Sciences Research Council illustrated how community violence traps learners along compromised transit corridors, while Dr Becky Sindall from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution highlighted the often-invisible hazard of open water where commutes lack secure footbridges or barrier fencing.
Overcoming Institutional Homelessness in Commute Safety
A critical turning point in the discussion emerged during the panel dialogue co-facilitated by Associate Professor Colleen Saunders from the University of Cape Town’s Division of Emergency Medicine and Dr Cinthia Pinto of Safe Kids Worldwide. A/Prof Saunders drew attention to what many practitioners recognise as “institutional homelessness”—while road safety typically finds an administrative anchor within ministries of transport, issues like drowning prevention and community violence often fall through departmental cracks.
“Drowning prevention and violence in particular have this ‘home’ issue—where does it belong? Road safety has a bit more of an intuitive home often in the Department of Transport, whereas the other two are often a little homeless in government.”
— Associate Professor Colleen Saunders, University of Cape Town
Dr Sindall reinforced that this institutional vacuum also presents a unique opening to identify unexpected allies. In Bangladesh, the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs leads drowning prevention because children make up the vast majority of victims. In Cambodia, the Ministry of the Interior steers interventions as a core community development priority. In Zanzibar, drowning sits under the Disaster Management Committee in the Prime Minister’s Office, founded on the reality that if a year’s worth of drowning deaths happened on a single day, it would be treated as an acute national catastrophe.
Ground-Level Insights for Sustainable Safe Journeys to School
Operationalising this work demands deep community ownership and systemic alignment. When asked for their defining takeaway, Dr Essack urged practitioners to design with, rather than for, communities by listening closely to local residents who best understand how interventions function on the ground. Dr Sindall reminded the room of Rabaney’s opening insight: children do not differentiate between hazards on their way to school, meaning practitioners must stop managing them in administrative silos.
“A child does not differentiate between the risks that they see on their journey. If we work together and pool our collective knowledge, we can make a difference on that issue.”
— Dr Becky Sindall, Royal National Lifeboat Institution
From an implementation standpoint, Poswayo emphasised that NGOs executing physical infrastructure must proactively embed their projects into larger institutional and government budgets to ensure long-term sustainability. Securing sustainable funding ensures that safe journeys to school become permanent municipal standards rather than short-term initiatives, because no child should ever lose their life simply trying to acquire an education.
Applying Public Health Frameworks and Ubuntu
Closing the workshop, Morag MacKay, Chief Research and Network Officer at Safe Kids Worldwide, anchored these reflections back to foundational public health principles. She urged delegates to apply established frameworks like the Haddon Matrix to examine the host, the agent, and the physical and social environments concurrently.
“Society builds what society builds, often without even considering children. Children don’t have a choice. All of us in this room are advocates who have to ensure that the child’s situation is visible at these tables—whether we are talking in a local community, at a national meeting, or at a global meeting where they are talking big World Bank questions.”
— Morag MacKay, Safe Kids Worldwide
By rigorously collecting local transit data and pairing robust epidemiological evidence with lived narratives, advocates can build an undeniable case for upstream investment before major roadway developments are even initiated. True to the spirit of Ubuntu—”I am because we are”—securing safe journeys to school cannot remain fragmented. Protecting children requires collective willpower, multisectoral accountability, and champions who refuse to look away. ChildSafe South Africa and its partners remain steadfast in their mission to bridge policy, evidence, and grassroots action until every single school journey is safe.