How School Safety and DRR Project supporting Nepal Government to operationalize SSDP of Nepal?

School Sector Development Plan is a seven year plan (2016-2023) devised by Nepal government to ensure equitable access of all to quality of education. The plan has carried a vision of contributing to the development of self-sustainable, competitive, innovative and value-oriented citizens for the socioeconomic transformation of the nation. Addressing the lessons learned from Gorkha earthquake, the plan has given due emphasis on school based disaster risk reduction and comprehensive school safety.

Promoting and Strengthening DRR and School Safety project is led by Child Centered Disaster Risk Reduction (CC-DRR) consortium. The consortium consists of Save the Children, Plan International Nepal and World Vision as members and UNICEF as strategic partner. Plan International Nepal is implementing this project focusing on 30 community and 10 private schools of Baglung district. This project is funded by European Union Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (ECHO).

The project is supporting Nepal government to meet the goals and objectives of SSDP related to DRR and school safety i.e. to mainstream DRR and school safety. SSDP's DRR and School safety objectives are as follows:

·                  To ensure all children have access to safe learning environment.

·                  To mainstream CSS and DRR in education sector by strengthening school level disaster management and resilience among communities.

To meet aforementioned objectives, the SSDP has set 10 strategies. The project is in line with these strategies.  Three expected outcomes of SSDP, school facilities resilient to different kind of disasters; strengthened school disaster management; and institutionalization of risk reduction and resilience education are in line with three pillars of comprehensive school safety framework (CSSF), Safe learning facilities; School disaster management, and Risk reduction and resilience education.

The project supports the schools to carry out multi hazard risk assessment and risk reduction planning. Then the schools will incorporate these risk reduction plans in their School Improvement Plans (SIPs) to ensure effective implementation. The schools prepare education continuity plans focusing on safe evacuation routes, safe havens, safe family reunification and child protection in emergency. The project will support schools in non-structural mitigation activities identified by multi hazard vulnerability and capacity assessment. These SIPs will be shared with respective local governments through a series of advocacy interventions for resource allocation in DRR and school safety activities.

The DRR focal teachers of the schools are being trained on basic first aid skill and the schools are provided with basic first aid kit to ensure basic first aid in schools during emergency. Further, the project also supports the District Education Office in stock piling of emergency education materials.

To spread important awareness messages within school and communities, the project will empower and support child and youth clubs. The teachers have been trained on DRR and School safety. The trained teachers will teach DRR lessons to the students and encourage to promote culture of safety and resilience at their homes too. The teachers training contents on DRR and School Safety have been incorporated within the TPD package. Similarly, head teachers, resource persons and school supervisors will be trained to ensure effective leadership, monitoring and evaluation of DRR and School Safety initiatives at schools.

The project further extends support in contingency planning, stakeholders mapping, sensitization to schools, and other activities for ensuring the mainstreaming of DRR and school safety in ongoing mechanism of education sector.

A minimum school safety package will be developed containing minimum standards of school safety and school based DRR in context of Nepalese schools. The project will support schools in nonstructural mitigation identified after multi hazard vulnerability and capacity assessment.

In this way, the project focuses on some major components of Pillar 2 and 3 of CSSF. However, it is important to pay attention to all components of all three pillars of CSSF. Similarly, it is essential to scale up the culture of school safety to more than 35,000 schools of Nepal. The project is continuously advocating in this regard and developing IEC materials applicable to people with disability too. The dissemination of these IEC materials will support to take these key messages to all Nepal.