SCOTIABANK Jamaica has won a gold camera award and two certificates of excellence for its road safety instructional video Street Smart Street Safe geared at teaching children to use our major roadways and thoroughfares safely.

The video, which is produced by the bank as part of its overall ‘Street Smart, Street Safe’ campaign, is focused on ‘Tia’m a Street Smart mascot who uses a customised pop song format and trendy dance moves to reinforce her messages of alertness, respect for and adherence to road rules.

Scotiabank developed the campaign as part of a rebranded road safety education programme at the start of the school year in September 2008. The new campaign, of which the award-winning video is an integral part, is aimed at making road safety education more interactive, innovative and attractive to young children.

The song for the video was written by local songwriter Lloyd Lovindeer. Its lyrics features Tia teaching her entourage of young school-aged friends how to use pedestrian crossings, sidewalks, and the roadways carefully – both day and night. Officers from the traffic division of the Jamaica Constabulary Force have been using this song and video as teaching aids when they take the programme into schools across the island daily.

“The award confirms what we have seen in schools across the island. The song is very catchy and the children get very excited whenever it plays and the mascot appears. The use of simple language, rhymes, the dance moves all work to make it easy for the children to remember. We are thrilled about the international recognition that the campaign has received, as it encourages us to continue in our outreach to the children,” Joylene Griffiths Irving, who leads the production team which received the accolades, said.

She said the campaign was a result of almost two years of hard work by the bank’s in-house production team led by Zoe Welsh.

Since being launched, several other external umbrella groups and organisations hosting children’s educational activities have invited the Street Smart Street Safe team to visit their events to showcase the programme and teach children road safety.

The bank has also produced posters, bookmarks and exercise books which are distributed in schools as resource material to reinforce the message. The traffic police also received a new five ton insulated truck, donated by the bank to assist the team in taking their props to the schools.

The Street Smart, Street Safe programme was produced at a cost of $6.5 million and has been taken into approximately 160 schools right across the island by the police since the start of the 2008-2009 academic year.