By Rebekah Paci-Green, Bishnu Pandey, and Robert Friedman.
August 2015, Risk RED.
Across Nepal, more than 8.5 million students attend pre-school through vocational school. As they learn, they sit in well over 82,000 school buildings at more than 35,000 school campuses. Approximately 75 percent of these campuses are public schools, built by the Ministry of Education and development partners.
Previous school safety studies carried out in the country estimated that approximately 89 percent of school buildings in Nepal as made of load-bearing masonry, a building type that is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes if no earthquake-resistant techniques are incorporated. In hilly regions more than 50 percent are the most vulnerable masonry type – rubble stone construction. A 2011 school vulnerability assessment estimated that because of Nepal’s seismic risk, more than 49,000 schools needed to be retrofitted and another 12,000 needed demolition and reconstruction. This was before the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake and aftershocks struck.
Nepal has undertaken efforts to address the structural vulnerability of schools. School safety retrofit and reconstruction efforts had reached about 160 schools and training had reached almost 700 masons in the Kathmandu valley – only some of these in the area affected by the April and May 2015 earthquakes. Innovative public education and mason training programs over the past two decades have included mason training, community outreach, and shake-table demonstrations as part of training and awareness programs.
On April 25, 2015, a massive M7.8 earthquake struck Western and Central Nepal, with an equally devastating aftershock of M7.3 striking in Central Nepal on May 12, 2015, as measured by the United States Geological Survey. According to the Government of Nepal Ministry of Education, the Gorkha Earthquake caused more than 27,000 classrooms to be fully destroyed by these events, and more than 26,000 classrooms to be partially destroyed. The cost of education sector recovery is estimated at almost $415m USD.
Read the Report: Safer Schools, Resilient Communities: A Comparative Assessment of School Safety after the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes (PDF)
