Building Climate Resilience in Mozambique - the case of Safer Schools

This publication starts with a description of the country’s overall natural hazard exposure and then focuses on human settlements’ vulnerability in Mozambique (Chapter 1). In Chapter 2 it describes the first milestone of UN-Habitat’s activities - the establishment of the Living with Natural Hazards approach - and its implementation through pilot demonstration buildings. It also gives examples of the construction interventions and methodology adopted in the Participation, Awareness and Didactic Approach. 

The narrative of Chapter 3 analyses the education sector. It gives an outline of its historical development and the geographic distribution of school infrastructure, as well as the vulnerabilities and risk profiles. This introduces the second milestone: the start of the preparatory activities, the implementation and the subsequent scaling-up from local demonstration pilots to the national scale. It further describes how the strategic and normative frameworks for resilient school construction in Mozambique have been influenced. The fourth chapter analyses how UN-Habitat’s work resulted in the Guidelines on School Safety and Resilient School Building Codes and how these helped consolidate partnership frameworks and the scaling-up of the Safer Schools Initiative under the leadership of Ministry of Education. 

The fifth and final chapter presents the validation of the Safer Schools Initiative, showing how more robust school buildings have all withstood the impacts of the strong cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019. This feat made the Government fully confident that the Living with Natural Hazards approach works. The text concludes with a summary of findings, lessons learned and recommendations for further scaling up of the Safer Schools Initiative in Mozambique and a possible replication in other vulnerability contexts.