WORKSHOP FOCUS

1. Public policy and school safety

Since school safety does not fall under high priority action of governments and is not linked with the national policy papers that deals with education and other millennium development goals, the workshop will discuss the challenges and examine the opportunities to mainstream the school safety into the education policy. It will explore the most appropriate approach to link the school earthquake safety with national poverty alleviation, millennium development goal and educational for all.

2. School retrofitting technology

Seismic vulnerability assessment of existing school buildings and prevailing construction practice is necessary prior to recommending specific earthquake safe technologies. While there are number of approaches and methods to conduct building assessments, there is a need to discuss the criteria of applicability for specific approaches and methods in the context of schools buildings looking at its importance and variance from other buildings. Furthermore, the suitability of specific technology for the Seismic retrofitting of existing school buildings and for the new earthquake resistant construction of school buildings varies according to material availability, socio-economic condition, prevailing construction system and national and local government’s standards among other reasons. These issues will be discussed in the workshop to come up with common generic approach for assessment and retrofit design/construction of school buildings.

3. Training, disaster education and earthquake risk communication

Retrofitting of school buildings and earthquake resistant new construction provides the opportunity to disseminate appropriate earthquake safe technology to local communities. On the job training to masons during the construction is a great opportunity for technology transfer and building capacity of the communities. Moreover, schools are the centre for a community, from where children and parents take knowledge and information to the society. Any knowledge on disaster prevention penetrated to school students will trickle down to the community through various means. Clearly, that will be a long term investment as today’s children are the future of our society. The issue how to best utilize the school retrofitting and disaster education will be discussed in the workshop and recommendation will be made for current and upcoming school retrofitting program to utilize the process for making earthquake resilient communities.

4. Field study of community based school retrofitting program

In Nepal, a number of community schools were retrofitted for earthquakes with involvement of community people and local governments. The innovative approach to involve the community people in their school safety program provided the opportunity for training and replication of technology to individual houses to make them safe from earthquakes. The concept of school safety later was later raised to the national government level and donors to make compliance for new educational building include earthquake resistant element. The work shop participants will be provided the opportunity to visit the sites and learn from the interactive communicat6ion with local people.