Development of a Safer Schools Program in Mozambique

The Development of a Safer Schools Program in Mozambique was designed to help the country’s government integrate risk considerations into school construction processes and investments to strengthen the resilience of school buildings. It supported the government in assessing the natural disaster environment and finding a balance between the construction of new, safer school infrastructure and the retrofitting of existing schools. It also included a Just-in-Time (JiT) assessment of existing school infrastructure and its exposure to natural hazards, as well as future education infrastructure needs. Special attention was paid to community-built schools, as they are quite common in Mozambique. The program also assisted the government in establishing the necessary institutional framework to achieve safer education infrastructure at scale.

Activities supported by the World Bank

• Improving the access to and sharing of better hazard information and risk data related to school infrastructure, including the production of higher-quality hazard maps, the carrying out of sharing activities among different stakeholder groups, and the screening of classrooms and data access

• Developing a disaster prevention and mitigation plan for resilient school infrastructure, in terms of both economic requirements and implementation strategy

• Enhancing the policy and regulatory environment—for example, through reform of regulations, norms, and institutional arrangements—to increase the resilience of schools

• Optimizing the delivery of resilient school construction at the local level, targeting both government- and community-based construction

• Conducting a fact-finding mission through school visits and meetings with key stakeholders, including international organizations, and analyzing existing data on hazard and risk 

Main outputs

• Completion of a Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment for the School Sector, which included the development of hazard zoning maps (cyclones, floods, earthquakes, and droughts) and building guidelines for disaster-resilient schools (“catalog of norms”) and recommendations for their effective implementation:

             1. The assessment estimated the value of damage to school infrastructure in Mozambique at US$2.1 million
                 per year, corresponding to 550 classrooms and 50,000 students affected annually

             2. The total cost of disaster risk adaptation was estimated at US$28 million, for 35,000 classrooms exposed to wind
                 and flood damage

• A high-level meeting with officials from the Ministry of Education and Human Development to present the results of the risk assessment and discuss the importance of increasing the resilience of school infrastructure to the main natural threats and of holding a technical workshop on improving it through risk-informed decision making

• A policy note summarizing the results from the risk assessment and policy recommendations for school retrofitting