January – December 2019 – Yen Bai, Thai Nguyen, Gia Lai, and Quang Nam, Vietnam

Since 2012, AIP Foundation and Johnson & Johnson have partnered together to promote child helmet use and deliver student road safety education at schools in target provinces throughout Vietnam through the Helmets for Kids program. In 2019, AIP Foundation celebrated its eighth year in partnership with Johnson & Johnson and several milestones and achievements through the Helmets for Kids program.

During the 2019 program year, Helmets for Kids reached a total 25,890 students, 25,890 parents, and 1,499 teachers across program schools in Yen Bai, Thai Nguyen, Quang Nam, and Gia Lia provinces, with the successful distribution of 5,966 quality helmets to vulnerable students in need. The program also marked an expansion of its outreach and activities to ethnic minorities. Through the program, students and teachers at target schools engaged in workshops, trainings, and educational materials on key road safety topics and safer road behaviors which emphasized the importance of helmet use to prevent road crash injuries or fatalities.

With the support of parents, teachers, key government partners, representatives of Johnson & Johnson Vietnam, and members of the media, Helmets for Kids successfully launched helmet handover ceremonies for 20 program schools in 2019, promoting community awareness of the life-saving importance of increasing child helmet use.  Across Thai Nguyen, Yen Bai, and Gia Lai province, filmed video observations before and after helmet distributions found that average helmet use rates among students had increased from 44% to 90% across the 20 schools.

Over the course of the year, students also engaged in extracurricular activities designed to reinforce their knowledge and understanding of safe road behaviors and the importance of helmet use from past program activities and trainings.

These interventions have demonstrated their life-saving impact. In Thai Nguyen province, a grade 5 student from a Helmets for Kids program school had been traveling on her way home from school, when a motorcycle suddenly crashed into the student’s bicycle and caused her head to hit the ground. Though the young student was hospitalized due to leg injuries, the helmet she had received through Helmets for Kids had protected her from a potentially severe head injury. With the support of Johnson & Johnson, the student was one of several program school students in 2019 whose damaged helmets were replaced by new quality helmets.

From 2020-2021, AIP Foundation will continue to implement the Helmets for Kids program to work with vulnerable program schools and communities. In the next few months, with the support of key partners, the program will work to develop road safety school action plans in partnership with target schools, collect parent commitment letters to encourage families’ pledges to their child’s safety, document cases of crashes involving students to assess program impact on safety, and host program review workshops to improve activity design and implementation.