Lessons for Life
Building a culture of safety and resilience to disasters through schools
Placing schools in the vanguard of initiatives to achieve greater resilience to disasters is one of the best ways in which governments can protect communities. This is because schools can bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and practical local action by transmitting messages, setting standards, and physically protecting the community from disasters. In this paper, ActionAid sets out its practical recommendations for governments. If implemented, these recommendations will help create a future in which school pupils such as those who died in the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and India would have had a greater chance of survival in schools built to withstand hazards, in which children who understand the warning signs of a tsunami are not the exception, and in which local authorities would have intervened before the school in the Philippines was built on unstable ground. (p. 4)