Kashmiri boy stands on the rubble of his school in Patika village in the Neelum Valley, some 25 km (15 miles) north of the earthquake-devastated city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir February 15, 2006. Winter weather has made life more difficult for survivors of last year's massive earthquake in South Asia, where more than two million people have been living in tents or crude shelters patched together from ruined homes. REUTERS/Thierry Roge
On World Disaster Reduction Day, ActionAid's Jack Campbell argues that Pakistan should seize the moment, rebuild its schools to be earthquake-resistant refuges, and educate a generation of children to be ambassadors for disaster preparedness.This year's U.N. World Disaster Reduction Day (Wednesday 11 October) falls in the same week as Pakistan mourns the 17,000 children lost when their classrooms crumbled around them in the earthquake one year ago. So Kofi Annan's message, that "disaster risk reduction begins at school", resonates even louder.
Words are fine, but they need to translate into concrete actions. ActionAid is leading the way on disaster preparedness in schools with projects in Nepal, Malawi, Haiti, Kenya, Ghana, Bangladesh and India, and more in the pipeline.
We have set out a blueprint for governments to do the same, offering a clear route forwards to stop the senseless loss of young lives. This can be done by ensuring the safety of school buildings and bringing teaching on hazards to the classroom.
In his message for World Disaster Reduction Day Kofi Annan says: "Children are especially vulnerable to the threats posed by natural hazards. At the same time they can be powerful agents of change. It is essential therefore to make disaster risk education a component of national school criteria".
For Muhammad Rashaim from Pakistani Kashmir, who lost three daughters in last year's earthquake, Annan's words ring painfully true. Standing beside the remains of the village high school that his children attended, pain is still etched across Muhammad's face.
"The earthquake was like judgement day, everyone was very afraid. But at first they forgot about the school. They were worried about their homes," Muhammad explains to me, recalling the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
"The school was a double storey building," he continues. "Thirteen children and eight teachers died. The school is now in a tent and iron shelter. We don't know when the government will rebuild the school - no one has visited us."
Muhammad's tragedy was repeated on a horrific scale across the Bagh district where every school was damaged or completely destroyed and over 8,000 people died. Had some of the children caught up in the emergency known what to do if disaster struck, many young lives could have been saved.
According to local colleagues, not one single school in the district had been repaired or rebuilt by the time of the memorial ceremonies one year on.
The way forward is staring the Pakistani Government in the face. There are two clear paths that they - and all national governments - must now take.
Firstly, rather than death traps, school buildings must be resilient to local hazards and capable of protecting children and their families during and after a disaster. This will mean schools are located safely, designed and constructed with hazards in mind and maintained systematically.
Secondly, governments are missing a huge opportunity if they do not exploit their school system as an unrivalled channel for public outreach on disaster preparedness and local action plans. Local hazards must be uniformly incorporated into teaching curricula, drawing on the good practice that already exists.
The responsibility for disaster preparedness does not just lie with Pakistan. 168 countries are committed to reducing the impact of disasters on their citizens agreed in the Hyogo Framework for Action, signed at the Kobe World Conference for Disaster Reduction in 2005.
The important step now is for governments to learn that reducing the impact of disasters must start at school. Where you build a school, how you build it, manage it and what you teach - or don't teach - is, put simply, a matter of life and death.
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