NRSA to leverage digital content to enhance road safety awareness

The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) says it will intensify the use of digital content, including animations, skits, and social media influencers, this year, to deepen road safety awareness, particularly among young people.

Mr Henry Asomani, the Deputy Director of Planning and Programmes, NRSA, said the shift was necessary because of the increasing failure of traditional outreach methods to reach the youth, who now dominate digital spaces.

“We are in the digital world. Whether we want it or not, we are in the digital world. And now, we’ve seen that most of these traditional ways of doing things, although we keep doing them, we are not able to get a lot of youth.

“So, we intend to intensify social media, and that’s the way forward,” he said in an interview with the Ghana News Agency.

Mr Asomani explained that the Authority planned to deploy short animations, viral skits, and collaborations with popular and influential personalities to promote safe road use.

“Everybody is on their phone. If you do a skit and it goes viral, almost everybody sees it. That is why we want to use skits and animations to preach road safety,” he explained.

He noted that while the NRSA would continue with traditional outreach programmes and media engagements, the digital approach was meant to complement and elevate existing strategies.

“Our intention is not to abandon the traditional methods but to take road safety education a notch higher by bringing in the digital aspect,” he added.

Mr Asomani identified funding as the major constraint to improving road safety nationwide.

“Road safety is very expensive,” he said, explaining that beyond enforcement and education, safety required significant investment in infrastructure such as pedestrian footbridges, road signage,e and protective barriers.

“Most of the time, when funding is inadequate, safety infrastructure is what gets ignored. We build roads for vehicles, but pedestrians, motorcyclists, ts, and cyclists are often left out,” he noted.

Mr Asomani highlighted the dangers posed by Ghana’s predominantly single-carriage highways, which he said contributed significantly to head-on collisions.

Citing the Suhum–Teacher Mante stretch as an example, he said the dualisation of the road had eliminated its “status as a crash-prone black spot.”

“When roads are dualised, we don’t expect head-on collisions anymore. If we can dualise most of our highways, it will significantly reduce fatal crashes,” he said.

Mr Asomani noted that the NRSA strongly supported the government’s “Big Push” infrastructure agenda and that the expansion and dualisation of highways would greatly enhance road safety.

Asomani commended the Ghana Police Service for introducing technology-driven enforcement systems, including traffic monitoring cameras, to reduce speeding and eliminate human interference during enforcement.

“With traffic technology, you don’t know where the camera is, but you know you are being monitored. That alone changes behaviour,” he added.

The Deputy Director acknowledged efforts by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) to improve driver training content and public sensitisation.

He said the NRSA had rolled out several campaigns in recent years, including passenger-focused speaker campaigns and the media-led “Stay Alive” campaign.

This year, he said the Authority would embark on an intensified road safety visibility campaign aimed at taking road safety education to the doorsteps of all Ghanaians.

“When we talk about visibility, it is not about the Authority but about road safety itself. We want everyone to understand and live road safety.”

Human behaviour accounted for about 90 per cent of road crashes, underscoring the need for sustained behaviour change campaigns, he said.

“It means that even if we fix the roads and the vehicles, the human factor remains critical.”