UNISDR School Safety Assessment

Children represent the future potential of human kind and education is the means through which that potential is unlocked. Unfortunately, that potential is all too often abruptly cut short. Collapsing schools in large-scale natural disasters kill children and account for a significant proportion of total disaster mortality. At the same time, thousands of schools are damaged each year in smaller scale disasters, interrupting education and with the loss of hard-earned development gains.
UNISDR is coordinating action to facilitate the announcement of a global programme for school safety at the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in March 2015, in Sendai, Japan. This will include core components of structural safety, disaster risk reduction in the curriculum and school disaster preparedness currently being developed by core partners (World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, Save the Children and Plan International amongst others).

To support this Global Programme, UNISDR is launching a crowd-sourcing initiative that will serve as a preliminary assessment and monitoring step to help locate vulnerable schools. This application will enable the users to assess the schools in their vicinity. This assessment data will further be available to the UNISDR and its partners for creating awareness about the disasters prone areas / schools.