The right to safety: building safe schools for children.

No one knows exactly how many people died in the earthquake that rocked Kashmir at 9 o'clock in the morning on a school day in October 2005. However, estimates show that many of the 55,000 or more who were killed were women at home and children in school. (1) The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), citing Pakistan Government's estimates, has stated that at least 17,000 schoolchildren died when 6,700 schools were destroyed in northwest Frontier Province and 1,300 in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to the BBC online news of 31 October 2005.

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In the run up to the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in 2004, many expert groups called attention to the exposure of schoolchildren to seismic risk. A major report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) dotted the "Is" and crossed the "Is". (2) It made clear that it is neither expensive nor technically difficult to reinforce most school buildings. An incremental approach of strengthening the source of the normal cycle of maintenance can further reduce the cost. Shortly before the Conference, Japan, the host country, announced funding for a new programme that focused on reducing the vulnerability of schoolchildren to earthquakes in the Asia Pacific region. (3)

GeoHazards International (www.geohaz.org) and the OECD more recently have embarked on an international effort to develop an independent audit of school construction programmes at the national level in an effort to raise building code standards and enforcement practices in OECD countries. However, the problem is not on developing and disseminating international standards, but that there is so much corruption in public and private construction.

In 2004, two years after the death of 26 schoolchildren in an earthquake in Italy, a group of nine colleagues and I reviewed the safety of schools in the world's seismically active zones. (4) We estimated that over the decade (2004-2014) some 4,800 schoolchildren were likely to die in school building collapses due to earthquakes. Our estimate seemed too high at that time, so we checked and re-checked our methods and data, but the tragedy in Kashmir shows that we may have underestimated the risk. We also attacked the fallacy asserting a conflict between human rights: the right to education versus the right to safety. Nor is there a conflict between school budgets used for salaries and teaching materials and for buildings, which often come from different sources.

The number of school buildings that need inspection and possible strengthening is quite large. UNICEF estimates that more than 7,500 new schools are needed in Afghanistan alone from 2004 to 2007, in order to meet the global targets laid down by the UN Millennium Development Goals. On the other hand, in the United States there may be as many as 8,000 non-ductile, older concrete school buildings in California in need of attention. (5) The scale of the task and the importance of local conditions mean that parents, teachers and many local people have to commit themselves to pushing for the safety of schools.

Our group also reviewed a series of case studies from Nepal, Algeria, Canada, Colombia, Turkey and Italy. There were initiatives involving parents and teachers, and also many successes to report with using low-cost technology. Elsewhere, there have been strides in developing networks for school safety promoted by the Organization of American States, (6) including in Asia with the assistance of the UN Centre for Regional Development.

What is missing? The missing links are awareness and political will. For the worldwide "Education for All" initiative to be successful, school rooms will have to be built to accommodate new students. In addition, it is not costly to protect schools. A new organization is being formed that will campaign for school safety. The Coalition for Global School Safety (COGSS) takes its inspiration from the work over the past few years of a handful of individual parents and courageous advocates. Dr. Tracy Monk, a family physician in Vancouver, British Columbia, Arrietta Chakos, a city official in Berkeley, California, and Amod Dixit in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, have all taken the leadership to successfully mobilize parents and school communities at the local level to demand and work for safe schools. Founding members from around the world, desiring to support these grass-roots successes, are working to establish COGSS.

The Coalition's focus is on worldwide awareness-raising, arming advocates with compelling evidence of risks, feasible risk-reduction methods and strategies for local advocacy. COGSS does not create schools but works to make existing and newly created schools safer. With the support from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute branch in Northern California, (7) they are creating a website and a compact disc with a "mother slideshow" chronicling school seismic disasters and near misses for advocates to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Mobilization of a broad cross section of professional stakeholders from more than a dozen disciplines is planned through a series of review articles for professional journals, as well as articles designed for popular magazines, to stimulate a worldwide cultural paradigm shift. Much help is needed from all walks of life to protect schools.

Notes

1 Reuters AlertNet, "Women's place at home their undoing in Kashmir quake", 14 October 2005.

2 OECD, Lessons in Danger: School Safety and Security. Paris: OECD, 2004.

3 "Assistance for Supporting 'Reducing the Vulnerability of School Children to Earthquakes Project' in the Asia-Pacific Region", 3 December 2004.

4 School Seismic Safety: Falling between the Cracks?, 25 August 2005.

5 Sharon Bernstein, "How Risky are Older Concrete Buildings?", Los Angeles Time, 11 October 2005.

6 The OAS schools programme was chosen for a list of "good practices" by the ProVention Consortium. (www.proventionconsortium.org/goodpractices/eduplan.htm)

7 The EERI Northern California branch programme on school seismic safety (www.quake06.org/quake06/task_committees_school_safety.html).

Ben Wisner is a Research Fellow with the Crisis States Program of the Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics, and at Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University College London. Those interested in working with COGSS should contact Dr. Marla Petal at [e-mail].

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