The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has organized refresher training for 200 commercial drivers in the Upper East Region on techniques of safe driving, in a bid to reducing road crashes in the country.

The training is in line with the government’s efforts to equip drivers across the country particularly commercial drivers on road safety measures and knowledge and skills on defensive driving to enable them to drive safely to avoid accidents.

The training had technical support from the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Authority (DVLA) and brought together transport operators and drivers from the O.A Travel and Tours and the Ghana Private Roads Transport Union (GPRTU).

Mr Dennis Yeribu, the Regional Head of the NRSA, said the phenomena of road crashes in the country was worrying and attributed much of the causes to inadequate knowledge on safety measures on the road.

He said it was against that background that government had committed resources to re-train about 13,000 commercial drivers across the country with 200 commercial drivers from the region benefitting from it.

Mr Yeribu said the provisional statistics of road crashes in the region indicated that from January to September, 2019, the region recorded 184 crashes resulting in 49 deaths and 170 injuries.

He said out of the number of fatalities, 39 were males while 10 were females.

He said motorbikes formed the largest portion of the vehicles involved in the crashes, and added that the youth within the ages of 18 to 35 were mostly involved, making the region to lose its energetic human resource base with families losing their breadwinners.

He said each year the region records an average of about 300 crashes with pedestrian knock downs forming about 43 per cent, “this region is too small to be losing people every week through road crashes”, he added.

Mr Yeribu expressed optimism that the refresher training would equip the drivers with the necessary knowledge and techniques to ply the roads safely to avoid crashes particularly as it was approaching the festive season when most of the accidents usually occur.

Mr Yeribu said the training as well as their usual outreach education covered schools and tricycle riders in the region as well.

Madam Tangoba Abayage, the Regional Minister, said the wellbeing of the country’s human capital was essential to achieving accelerated sustainable national development and advised the drivers to learn and apply the knowledge in their respective endeavours to help save lives and resources.

She advised the drivers to obey road traffic regulations as well as avoid actions such as drunk-driving and over speeding that could easily lead to accidents.