IRAP's Vietnam Home-to-School Travel Safety Program
One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024
For making roads safer through innovative AI technologies
Region: Asia Pacific Sector: Infrastructure UN SDGs: 3, Good Health and Well-being; 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities
Worldwide, car ownership is at an all-time high. Despite global improvements in the variety and accessibility of public transportation in urban areas, the car craze shows no signs of pumping the brakes. Ownership rates have increased steadily every year since 1980, and today, there are more than one billion cars on the road. It’s not surprising, then, that road traffic accidents are among the top 10 causes of death in the world, and for children, they are the number one cause of death, especially in developing countries. Many of these deaths, especially those that involve pedestrians, could be prevented by “promoting efficient patterns of land use and providing shorter, safer routes for vulnerable road users,” according to the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization that improves human health and well-being through evidence-based policies and practices.
But how do cities or countries implement these two key recommendations on a practical level? The International Road Assessment Programme (IRAP), a nonprofit working to eliminate high-risk roads around the world, has an answer. In 2023, it introduced the project AI&Me: Empowering Youth for Safer Roads in Vietnam to improve road safety for children and adolescents along routes to and from school. Young people between the ages of 10 and 24 suffer high rates of injuries due to poor road safety — 17.2 percent of road-related fatalities in Vietnam are in this age group. The program was deployed in three urban areas — Ho Chi Minh City, Pleiku City, and Yen Bai City — and began by collecting data from 1,063 schools in these areas. The project team used big data to determine which schools present the highest risks when it comes to getting to or from their campus.
But in addition to data generated by artificial intelligence (AI), a cornerstone of the AI&Me project is the “me” part. Students were encouraged to use a purpose-designed mobile application, Youth Engagement App (YEA), to report sites where they feel safe or unsafe along the routes they travel to school. Students dropped pins that marked 20,000 safe or unsafe sites, coupling the pins with comments about risks they’ve witnessed.

Around 100 schools were identified as high-risk after IRAP and its partners analyzed the data and student reports and considered them in tandem. By assigning schools a star rating (1 star indicates the least safe area/school; 5 represents the safest), IRAP signaled to city governments which schools and surrounding areas need to be able to prioritize for infrastructure improvement. While there is still more work to be done, the IRAP team, partners, and donors were able to improve seven schools, while municipal governments made 87 improvements across 13 other schools with the collaboration of public and private stakeholders.
The data live on a platform called Citizen Portal, which is accessible to the general public and can be used by various community groups and individuals to advocate for road safety improvements and infrastructural enhancements. Government officials can also consult the portal to help them prioritize projects — as such, it is a crucial tool in a context where limited resources prevent fixing all of the identified problems.
Students themselves report their confidence in the project as a vehicle for meaningful change that can improve safety on their school routes. One ninth grader in Pleiku City recounted her experience with the YEA app for project partners. She reported that the app allowed her to flag a number of dangerous potholes along the route to Nguyen Du Secondary School. She immediately recognized that peers who also reported the potholes could collectively create a record of risk that might motivate government officials to take corrective action. The student became more active in community improvement initiatives once she saw that IRAP’s project resulted in concrete change.