The researcher, Dr. Jimmy Osuret (in an orange reflector jacket), together with his team, mounts video cameras during his PhD study.
In 1996, as a Primary Four pupil at Shimoni Demonstration School along the busy Nile Avenue corridor in Kampala, Jimmy Osuret watched a classmate attempt to cross the road on an ordinary school day. A truck did not slow down. The child did not make it to the other side.
“It stayed with me,” Osuret recalls. “At the time, I didn’t have the language for it. But that moment shaped how I came to understand injuries–not as accidents, but as something patterned, preventable, and deeply unfair.”
Nearly three decades later, the school has moved and the road has changed but Kampala’s traffic has grown more unforgiving. Children still gather at pavements across the city, backpacks bouncing, eyes fixed on gaps in traffic that may or may not come.
Osuret returned to these streets not as a schoolboy navigating danger, but as a public health scientist determined to change what danger looks like for Uganda’s children. For that research, he will be graduating with a PhD in Public Health from Makerere School of Public Health.
Osuret’s journey into injury research blossomed through lived experience, service and grief. After completing his Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Health at Makerere University, he volunteered with the Uganda Red Cross Society in Bushenyi District, western Uganda, where he was exposed to emergency response, first aid, and trauma care. Road crashes were no longer statistics but bleeding bodies and panicked families. “That experience changed how I saw injuries,” he says. “They weren’t isolated events. They were predictable outcomes of unsafe systems.”
His MSc in Public Health at Oxford Brookes University deepened that lens. But personal loss cemented his resolve: a cousin was killed in a hit-and-run road crash. Together, these experiences shaped the research question that would define his PhD: why are Kampala’s roads so unsafe for children, and what actually works to protect them?
For his PhD at the Makerere University School of Public Health, Osuret turned to the road itself. Using discreetly mounted video cameras at school crossings across Kampala, his team observed thousands of real interactions between children, vehicles, and the built environment. The footage captured hesitation, urgency, and near misses. One in five children failed to wait at the pavement; more than a quarter crossed outside marked crosswalks; many ran or crossed between vehicles when drivers failed to yield.
“These behaviours are not random,” Osuret explains. “They respond directly to what drivers do and what the road allows.” He argues that unsafe crossing is not carelessness but a survival strategy in hostile environments. “Children are expected to behave safely in systems that are fundamentally unsafe,” he says. “That is not reasonable, and it is not ethical.”
Crucially, the data revealed that where trained school traffic wardens were present, behaviour changed. In a cluster-randomized trial across 34 public primary schools, Osuret’s team introduced a low-cost school traffic warden programme. Drivers were more than seven times more likely to yield to children. Children were 70% more likely to cross safely–stopping at the pavement, walking instead of running, and avoiding dangerous gaps between vehicles.
“What surprised me most was how quickly children adapted,” Osuret recalls. “When the system supported them, safer behaviour became the norm.” The intervention also exposed limits: some drivers ignored wardens or were hostile, underscoring that behaviour change requires enforcement and policy backing, not goodwill alone.
Today, Osuret serves on national road safety platforms and continues to push for child-centred road design. “The gap is not knowledge,” he says. “We know what works. The gap is translating evidence into action.” His core message is simple: design roads around children, not vehicles–because no child should have to gamble with their life just to cross the road.
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