Earlier this month, the Alliance Accelerator was piloted in Kampala, Uganda. The Accelerator will help NGOs to look at road safety challenges with a bottom-up approach, working from the problem to the solution, and utilizing Design Thinking and the Business Canvas Model.
The pilot accelerator was attended by seven NGOs, government officials, academics, and media representatives. The Director of Traffic and Road Safety, Uganda police force, presented a case study, narrating a fatal accident involving a motor vehicle and a lorry carrying sugarcane where 15 passengers were reported dead and two were seriously injured due to over speeding.
The accelerator was also attended by the Director of Transport and the Commissioner for Traffic Regulations and Safety from the Ministry of Works and Transport, who opened the session.
Sam Bambanza, Hope for Victims of Traffic Accidents (HOVITA), and Tumwine Fred Nkuruho, URRENO were among attendees at the pilot accelerator. We asked them about their experiences of the accelerator.
“The accelerator backed up what we learned at the Alliance Campaign Management training in Sweden. After that training, I tried to apply the model but it was hard to get my government contacts to engage with it. Because they had the opportunity to attend the accelerator, it will be easy for us to advance our advocacy with them.
“The accelerator was beyond my expectation because it bought new participants to our agenda and brought greater recognition for the Alliance with key stakeholders in the Ministry of Works and Transport, which will help our advocacy.
“After the campaign training in Sweden, I began to use the Business Canvas Model to developed the Smart Travel campaign in Uganda focusing on bus transport safety to reduce casualties, increase safety knowledge within the public transport sector, and ensure COVID-10 compliance.
Following the Accelerator, I plan to use the Design Thinking concept to design another project with the revenue authorities, that will enable them to collect more revenue, while also enabling victims to access justice and strengthen the revenue authority’s engagement with road safety. I am excited that this will be one of the Alliance Accelerator’s pioneer projects and could be replicated elsewhere.“
“The accelerator training was interesting and very informative. It wasn’t what I expected, especially the tools. The tools were a new approach to planning and implementing projects.
The design thinking stood out to me, in particular, since the planning considers the end results at the starting of the project. We intend to incorporate design thinking in our advocacy programs. We shall put more efforts in inclusion of stakeholders in the advocacy process.”
