Fight against road trauma in the United Arab Emirates

Between 2005 and 2008 I taught business and computer science at a women’s university in the United Arab Emirates. My students were all Emirati women (UAE nationals) who, by Western standards, had led very sheltered lives.

His knowledge of the simple things we take for granted was nonexistent, incorrect, or limited. For example, few knew how a credit card system worked. They had no knowledge of workplace health and safety, environmental concerns, or could understand how Western women could have children out of wedlock. The latter was haram (forbidden) in their culture.

Teaching them was a pleasure. They were like sponges, ready to soak up whatever information they could, and they certainly had a good sense of humor. They were very respectful, treating me with the respect of a father figure since I was much older than any of them and, of course, a man.

One of the subjects of the last year was Project Management in which there were two levels. During the first level, they managed the planning, organization, operation and evaluation of a party with numerous local businessmen who attended to sell their products to students, teachers and women from their families. This always achieved excellent educational results due to the breadth of activities that could be included.

I remember racking my brain for their final project management activity and decided to give them a road safety project because road fatalities were very high in the UAE and little was being done in the way of prevention. Sheik Zayed Road in Dubai was identified as the world’s most dangerous road with one fatality every 30 hours and many more non-fatal injury incidents.

The standard of the main roads within the UAE was at the time better than I had seen in Australia or anywhere else, so the deaths were largely due to driver behavior and a lack of what they should have been common safety practices, like strapping heavy loads to the back of trucks. Not a few had slipped, crushing cars and their occupants at roundabouts.

As a former police officer and traffic accident investigator before beginning my teaching career, I was alarmed to see children standing on their mothers’ laps in front of vehicles, not wearing seat belts, indicating when to turn, excessive speed on densely populated streets and so on. It was even common practice for taxi drivers to cut the seat belts of their new taxis because they believed that it was offensive to Allah, their protector, to think that they had to take measures to protect themselves.

Despite the obvious cultural differences, I decided to give them a Road Safety Project and the formal objectives were:

1. Learn to scope, plan, implement, manage and evaluate a project
2. Produce an information strategy to promote awareness of safe driving and road safety

The hidden curriculum (informal goal) was to raise awareness in students in the hope that they would influence their friends and family to practice safe driving and related habits. If I could get children to be placed in proper child restraints instead of standing on their mother’s knee, something good would happen.

I had a hard time convincing my supervisor that a road safety issue was relevant to business discipline. I argued that the skills used in project management are universal to any field of study. He eventually agreed to my request, albeit reluctantly, and the project went ahead.

Young women in the United Arab Emirates are very creative and respond well to hands-on activities. Therefore, this project was designed with that in mind.

As a group, the students and I devised a strategy that included a variety of wall posters, A4-folded brochures, and other media that would be distributed in their suburbs and perhaps handed out in major shopping malls as drivers entered or exited.

To get onto the media stage, students had to research road safety facts and figures. We managed to locate numerous road safety videos from the UK, US and Australia covering every topic imaginable. They loved watching the video clips and took in the messages they contained.

Each video clip had an important message: don’t drink and drive (not a problem in the UAE, where most people don’t drink), wear seat belts, don’t speed, keep a vehicle in good mechanical condition, adjust your mirrors, put children in approved child seats or harnesses, don’t overload your vehicle (a chronic challenge in the UAE), and much more, including slowing down when approaching camels on the road.

All of this information complemented the overall picture of planning, organizing, delivering and evaluating their project, and in the end, we had a road safety product to be proud of, complete with a cornucopia of attractive and well-designed posters and brochures.

One of the students had a relative who was a senior officer in the Dubai Police Department and he and a couple of colleagues decided to visit our university to inquire about our project. They talked to me and my students and were delighted with the results we had achieved that no one had achieved before in the United Arab Emirates. They said they would recommend the national adoption of our Road Safety Campaign and congratulated us on a job well done.

My supervisor received many compliments for allowing me to run the project and everyone seemed pleased. The project that a few months earlier had been questioned as having little to do with business was now popular and influencing hearts and minds, if nothing else.

Only a few months later my contract expired and I decided to return to Australia.

Returning to the UAE two years later for a holiday, I noticed that more people seemed to be wearing seat belts, but I never thought to ask about general traffic incident statistics, so I have no idea if our project was it really adopted and if so, did it make any difference. I sincerely hope so.

Seeing people killed and injured in totally preventable traffic incidents was one of the least encouraging aspects of my police career.