The National Traffic Safety Committee (NTSC), in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) and Honda Vietnam Company Ltd (Honda Vietnam) have announced that approximately 1.95 million quality helmets will be donated to all first-graders in Vietnam at the beginning of the upcoming 2018 school year. Protec, our social enterprise helmet factory, will produce approximately 700,000 of the helmets.

This exciting announcement represents the culmination of years of advocacy and awareness-raising by road safety stakeholders in Vietnam. At the beginning of 2015, we launched the National Child Helmet Action Plan (NCHAP) in Vietnam, bringing together major partners to discuss ways to sustain and improve child helmet use. As part of NCHAP, and in partnership with The UPS Foundation, we employed large-scale public awareness campaigns that helped increase child helmet use rates in Hanoi, Danang, and Ho Chi Minh.

The success of NCHAP has prompted the government to take action to promote child helmet use within the country. And on 19 January 2018, the Prime Minister issued Directive 04/CT-TTg, with the goal of raising child helmet use rates in Vietnam to 80% by 2020. The current helmet distribution plan sponsored aims to support this Directive as well as the earlier foundational work carried out by NCHAP.

View more photos from the announcement launch ceremony here.