Event Summary
Organization: World Bank Group
Session Leads
- Fernando Ramirez Cortes, World Bank Group
- Vica Rosario Bogaerts, World Bank Group
Speakers
- Camilo Carillo, Ministry of Education, Peru
- Luis E. Yamin, Los Andes University
- Dilip Shrestha, Department of Education, Nepal
- Mark Polyak, Courage Services
- Carina Ferreira, World Bank Group
- Hayley Gryc, Arup
Description
Over the last decade, governments, multilateral and bilateral development institutions, and non-governmental agencies have been engaged in efforts to make schools resilient to natural hazards. While some countries have been able to make reduce the vulnerability of its existing school infrastructure stock, most countries demonstrate limited progress. Taking existing pilot school risk reduction projects to scale requires increased access to financing as well improvements related to implementation. The latter includes, among other things, adopting a systematic approach to identify and prioritize schools for retrofitting, and optimization of traditional engineering techniques.
The data and tools required to move beyond pilot school risk reduction projects, however, are often not available. Most Ministries of Education do not have a geo-referenced school infrastructure inventory which provides insight into the level of exposure and vulnerability of its schools. This makes it difficult to determine where the country stands today and to develop multi-year risk-informed school infrastructure strategies. When disasters strike, Ministries of Education do not have the tools and processes in place to conduct large-scale assessments of the affected school infrastructure which go beyond the collection of damage information but also provide the opportunity to collect vulnerability information to start using risk information for future infrastructure planning.
To reach scale, discussion of new approaches and technologies that are currently available need to be integrated. This session brought together representatives from government, academia, and the private sector to present and discuss a number of ongoing efforts to use innovation to improve current strategies to make schools resilient. The focus was on the following:
- Using big data to establish a global baseline for school safety
- Reaching scale while ensuring quality of post-disaster structural integrity and damage assessments: the case of Nepal
- Thinking differently about prioritization of schools at risk to accelerate the pace of retrofitting: the case of Peru
Ignite
By Vica Rosario Bogaerts, World Bank Group
