Resilience of school communities in Malawi

Malawi is prone to several natural hazards including flooding-which occurs frequently, and earthquakes – which can cause significant damage to building stock as noticed during the 2009 Karonga earthquake. The impact of such events is exacerbated by poor socio-economic condition of the communities that in turn makes disaster recovery challenging. This study focuses on assessing the resilience of educational communities in Malawi by utilising a community resilience framework initially developed for Nepalese schools as part of the SAFER Nepal project (www.safernepal.net) following the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. The framework uses various indicators ranging from school infrastructure to governance and hazard preparation to capacity. These are assessed through a set of questions which have been built into a mobile app for ease of use by the stakeholders. The objectives of this paper are to report on the application of the SAFER framework in the context of Malawi as a test-bed for other low-income countries and to present the findings from an initial set of schools serving urban and rural communities. The results show that the SAFER framework can be adopted easily for any country to self-assess the resilience of school communities and to take timely measures to improve it.