SAFER: Improving seismic resilience of schools and educational communities

After a natural disaster it is typical for most efforts to focus on shelter, recovery and reconstruction without due consideration of a wider framework for building back better buildings and at the same time creating infrastructure and institutions that are resilient to different shocks and stresses. Our large-scale research, through SAFER Nepal project (www.safernepal.net), has addressed this need through the development of a SAFER toolbox for improving the earthquake-related safety of school buildings and for enabling the educational communities to find their own pathways to become resilient against a range of hazards. This requires a holistic framework for the pre- and post-earthquake assessment of school buildings under a standardised procedure which is easy to use by the stakeholders including local authorities. Such a framework has been built into the SAFER toolbox thus enabling prioritisation of school buildings, based on statistical data, for retrofitting and adaptation measures at different geographic scales. The scoring procedure used here is capable of incorporating relevant data for any country. SAFER also offers a framework and a mobile app for the evaluation of resilience of an educational community. This consists of fourteen indicators with associated set of questions for each category of educational stakeholder. All the questions with objective responses are quantified and an overall educational community resilience index is calculated. The mobile app can be used by the educational community for the self-assessment of schools and track their resilience with time.