Let our children teach us! A review of the role of education and knowledge in disaster risk reduction

Action focused on schools should be an important part of efforts to building communities’ resilience to disasters and, this paper argues, children of all ages should be directly engaged in learning about risks and identifying solutions to protect schools. This review sets out a strategy to address the knowledge management, education and risk awareness needs of communities through:

• promoting more and better teaching about hazards and risk reduction in schools
  
• creating schools as models and centres of participatory risk reduction in their communities
  physical protection of schools from natural hazards.

The paper reviews the experiences of educating children in disaster-prone areas across the world, and describes a variety of participatory approaches, and examines the use of strategies involving child-to-child peer education, the use of songs, electronic and print media, action learning, and using science education as a means to introduce studies of disaster risk.

It finds that educating children can be an effective approach in reducing vulnerability to risk. The author suggests that students from primary school to post-graduate study can actively study the safety of their own schools and work with teachers and community members to find ways to protect them. They can also spread the methods of participatory vulnerability and capacity assessment and hazard mapping to the broader communities surrounding schools and other institutions of education and research.

The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the gaps and constraints in such an approach, and potential opportunities to address them.