The Youth Engagement App (YEA) has reached an exciting milestone, surpassing 50,000 user-submitted pins and demonstrating the growing role of young people in identifying road safety concerns and helping create safer journeys to and from school.

With 56,245 locations reported, YEA has become one of the largest youth-led road safety data collection initiatives focused on school environments. Every pin represents a student sharing their experience of travelling to school, highlighting locations they perceive as safe, unsafe, or very unsafe.

Together, these contributions provide valuable insights into the real-world challenges young people face every day.

Youth demonstrate how to use the YEA.

Developed as part of the Star Rating for Schools (SR4S) family of tools, YEA enables students to easily report road safety conditions around their schools by dropping pins on a map, uploading photographs, and sharing comments. The platform transforms young people from passive road users into active contributors to road safety, ensuring their perspectives help inform assessments, interventions and investment decisions.

Vietnam Leading the Way

Vietnam has been the driving force behind the success of YEA. As the birthplace of the application, the country remains the platform’s most active and supportive contributor.

Through AIP Foundation initiatives such as AI&Me: Empowering Youth for Safer Roads, AI&Me: Leveraging AI Tools for Road Safety Impact, and Empowering Youth for Livable Cities, thousands of students across multiple provinces have used the app to identify road safety risks and contribute their perspectives on school travel conditions.

The strong engagement of Vietnamese students has helped demonstrate that digital tools can effectively scale youth participation while generating meaningful evidence to support road safety improvements. Their contributions have provided valuable information for school safety programmes and helped strengthen the principle that road safety decisions affecting young people should actively incorporate their voices.

A Growing Global Movement

YEA’s impact now extends well beyond its country of origin. The platform has expanded to support initiatives in countries including Chile, South Africa, Indonesia, Peru, and the UK, where students are contributing local knowledge and helping build a deeper understanding of road safety risks around schools.

As the platform grows internationally, it is creating an unprecedented repository of youth perspectives on the safety of school journeys. By combining community perception with objective assessments through the Star Rating for Schools methodology, decision-makers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by children and young people.

Local partners supporting YEA initiatives include Automóvil Club de Chile (Chile), ChildSafe South Africa (South Africa), Transportologi (Indonesia), MOVISS (Peru), and the Road Safety Foundation (United Kingdom). Their collaboration is helping expand youth participation in road safety and strengthen evidence-based action to improve school journeys.

Looking Ahead

Reaching more than 56,000 reported locations is more than a technological achievement. It is a powerful demonstration that youth engagement can be achieved at scale and that the voices of children and young people can provide critical evidence for safer roads.

Every pin tells a story. Together, those 56,245 stories are helping build a future where every journey to school is safer for children and young people.

Acknowledgement

This work is delivered under projects supported by Google.org, Fondation Botnar and FIA Foundation. The continued development and deployment of the Youth Engagement App has also been made possible through the collaboration of schools, local communities, road safety practitioners and partner organisations committed to empowering young people and improving school road safety worldwide.