The Safer Schools Thematic Area is proud to launch the Roadmap for Safer and Resilient Schools OLC course. Over 1,000,000 school buildings are at risk from earthquakes and tropical cyclones, as per data from the Global Baseline of School Infrastructure. This dramatically impacts the school community’s operations: initiatives to fully restore the educational services can be prolonged and expensive and generations of children suffer serious setbacks and have their futures compromised.
Inspired by Japan’s experience in addressing the multiple challenges associated to the implementation of large-scale risk reduction programs in the education sector, the Roadmap for Safer and Resilient Schools (RSRS) is a step-by-step guide intended to support governments of developing countries exposed to natural hazards, a product of the experience of World Bank task teams working on school infrastructure resilience with a focus on schools and education.
With this new course, the Roadmap is unpacked and learners are offered an immersive experience by engaging with a hypothetical project to illustrate all the phases of the Roadmap. Specialists involved in the planning, design, and implementation of risk reduction programs across large stocks of school facilities will have a chance to learn the basics of all the 8 Steps of the Roadmap, from the initial diagnosis phase to the actual implementation of a thorough school infrastructure plan.
Learners will be encouraged to learn from a real-life context as they join a group of fictional World Bank employees working together with a local government team with one goal: to find the best, most cost-efficient solutions to protect schools and students from the devastating natural hazards they are exposed to.
The new OLC course was carefully designed to be a friendly, accessible gateway to the Roadmap for Safer and Resilient Schools (RSRS) and the Global Library of School Infrastructure (GLOSI), two powerful tools in the global effort to make schools safer and more resilient to natural hazards across the world.
The Roadmap for Safer and Resilient Schools course is now available on the World Bank Online Learning Campus. Register here. If you have any questions about the course or would like to learn more about how the roadmap can be used for you or your team, please feel free to contact us at: gpss@worldbank.org.