Secretary of the National Traffic Safety Committee Brigadier Mohammed Abdullah Al Maliki
Doha: Secretary of the National Traffic Safety Committee (NTSC) Brigadier Mohammed Abdullah Al Maliki has said that the committee is working to include traffic safety within the curricula of universities and military colleges in Qatar.
Brigadier Al Maliki also said that deaths due to traffic accidents have significantly reduced below the global average.
“We have traffic safety activities within the educational curriculum for school students, especially pre-primary, to secondary school. That was one of the committee’s first actions. Now we are working on a road safety curriculum for some military colleges and universities in Qatar,” he told Qatar Radio yesterday.
Since it began operation, the NTSC has succeeded in reducing the number of traffic deaths significantly, compared to eight years ago.
“Since we started the committee’s work approximately eight years ago, the accident death rate for every 100,000 people in the State of Qatar now records 4.4 deaths, which is less than the global average.
“At the beginning, the goal was to reduce the number to 6 deaths per 100,000 people, but we succeeded in the first phase to reach 5.5 deaths per 100,000 people,” Al Maliki said.
For his part, the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Dr. Ibrahim bin Saleh Al Nuaimi, a member of the NTSC, said that every school has activities related to traffic safety to remind students of the importance of road safety.
Speaking to The Peninsula, he said more attention was paid to the streets surrounding the schools in cooperation with the Public Works Authority (Ashghal). The road network around schools was constructed to the best safety standards.
Meanwhile, Brigadier Al Maliki highlighted that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) praised Qatar’s efforts to reduce traffic accidents within a record period, thanks to all participating parties’ actions.
“Because of the success of the Qatari experience in traffic safety, several countries benefited from Qatar’s experience in “traffic safety management.”
Qatar has succeeded in a few years to reduce the number of road deaths despite the increase in the population, the number of vehicles and other factors,” he added.
