Scaling Up Efforts to Improve Safety and Resilience of School Infrastructure in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Scaling Up Efforts to Improve the Safety and Resilience of School Infrastructure in Eastern Europe and Central Asia leveraged World Bank engagements on safer schools activities in Central Asia to enhance and facilitate the design of policy reforms and intervention plans for making school infrastructure safer and resilient at scale. The engagement sought opportunities to consolidate existing information on school infrastructure, supported the design of national long-term risk reduction and investment strategies, and promoted knowledge-sharing activities through workshops and learning exchanges. It supported all Central Asian economies, with a particular focus on the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan.

Activities supported by the World Bank

• Building of a national school infrastructure baseline recording the status quo of existing buildings, which could then be analyzed for opportunities for improvement

• Analysis of representative building types using innovative performance-based design techniques. In the Kyrgyz Republic, the analysis built on previous projects and looked at additional representative building types

• Design of risk reduction strategies at scale and integration of safety, energy efficiency, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities into public infrastructure investments that would include solutions to optimize educational infrastructure networks

• Building of key stakeholder capacity to scale up safer schools actions in Central Asia by consolidating school infrastructure information available in the region (on risk exposure, physical condition, structural typologies, and vulnerability)

• Holding of a regional workshop to share knowledge and disseminate information on the topic of safer schools and development of a comprehensive training program on the topic of seismic risk assessment and retrofitting options for school facilities in Central Asia

Main outputs

• Catalog of representative school building types and their seismic vulnerability in the Kyrgyz Republic

• Regional and local workshops on safer schools

• A “Learning by Doing” training program on key safer school infrastructure topics, including study tours, working sessions, and field surveys

• A thorough methodology to assess educational infrastructure networks based on accessibility and safety

• Use of performance-based risk assessment to establish prioritization criteria for the intervention of a portfolio of over 3,000 school facilities

• Knowledge exchange trip of 10 participants from the Kyrgyz Republic to visit the Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation Project (ISMEP) in Turkey