Project Response to Risk: Helping build disaster resilience in Cox’s Bazar
Stepping in: The journey begins
This year, Teach For Bangladesh began placing fellows in Cox’s Bazar, a region facing ongoing humanitarian challenges and frequent natural disasters, known for its Education in Emergency (EiE) context. As part of this pioneer cohort, my co-teacher Md. Sayef Ferdous Khan and I started teaching at a government primary school in an underserved community in Ukhiya Upazilla, Cox’s Bazar.
On a sunny day in January 2024, we had asked our students to bring a copy of their birth certificates to class for some documentation purposes. To our surprise, about 95% of them said they'd lost their birth certificates and other important papers during the last monsoon season due to water damage. A few months later, during the extreme temperature in April-May, we noticed many students didn't know how to stay safe during a heatwave. Some even missed school as they were physically weak and dehydrated. Despite having a water bottle provided by the school, we have hardly any of our students brought water with them or refilled their bottles from the school water source. We also noticed that attendance dropped significantly after natural disasters. For instance, after Cyclone Remal in May, attendance was as low as 6-8% for a week, and it took about three weeks to get students back in the classroom. We took time to observe, survey, and analyze this situation by visiting the community and talking with parents and other local stakeholders. We found that, due to a lack of effective interventions and widespread illiteracy, the majority of the local community lacks the basic understanding of disaster preparedness and response models. This leads to severe, repeated impacts from disasters each year. During the recovery period, many school-going children stay home to help their families, which often leads to long breaks from school and, sometimes, permanent dropouts. After discussing these issues with our Teach For Bangladesh coach, we saw an opportunity to address this through our CAPSTONE Project.
Disaster literacy, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), is “the ability of an individual to access, read, understand, and use the information necessary to make informed decisions and follow instructions in the context of mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery during a disaster.” With our initiative, Project R2R: Response to Risk, our goal was to build a climate-resilient generation capable of making informed decisions during disasters to minimize the impact. At the same time, we aimed to reduce the bounce-back time of the students getting back to school after such disasters. As part of the Teach For Bangladesh program, we received a two-day residential training on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) provided by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). This training has significantly enhanced our confidence, resourcefulness, and expertise in planning, designing and executing this project.
Ripple effects: Impact beyond the classroom
By blending the Student Leadership approach with Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development, we focused on building up essential knowledge and skills with our students, focusing on seven specific disasters identified through historical profiling of this community. In the Educate and Motivate Phase, we conducted six sessions, including two sessions on preparedness and response models for Cyclone, Excessive Rainfall & Flash Flood, led by experts from the Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP). We also organized an Educational Continuity Plan meeting with parents and discussed their role in supporting their children's academic progress in post-disaster periods.
In the Activate Phase, our students participated in three capacity-building sessions, including a drill on earthquake preparedness. They retained and applied knowledge from the previous phase by creating and presenting posters to their classmates and also executed an earthquake evacuation drill by practicing the Drop-Cover-Hold method. Following Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, we developed a framework to make students "More Knowledgeable Others" (MKO), equipping them to share their knowledge and empower others through the student leadership model. These phases not only fostered disaster preparedness knowledge and skills, but also nurtured leadership traits so that students could effectively share knowledge within the community.
In the Advocate Phase, our students led a Community Engagement activity to present their understanding of disaster preparedness and response strategies to their parents and other community members. They shared the importance of community collaboration in enhancing capacity building and reducing disaster impact. Recognizing the need for community involvement, they encouraged all stakeholders to work together and called for action. So far, this project has reached 708 direct and indirect beneficiaries.
To ensure sustaining impact, following an achievement test, we established the Disaster Emergency Response Team (DERT), a volunteer group of seven students from grades 3 to 5, to share disaster safety information with peers and the community before and during any future disasters. This team is now an integral part of our school, and new volunteers will be added in the upcoming years. One assistant teacher has taken the responsibility of overseeing the overall process of this team. We also published a Disaster Literacy Manual, offering essential guidance that current and future students can use to build disaster preparedness knowledge. Additionally, our school authority has committed to conducting two annual community meetings on disaster literacy, led by teachers, to keep everyone informed and prepared. These initiatives aim to create a sustained flow of knowledge and resilience throughout the school and community.
Our key learnings
Disasters are inevitable and, in many situations, impossible to anticipate. This project made us understand that we must help people living in disaster-prone regions build their capacity to acquire climate resilience. Resilience is the key to confronting such disasters and mitigating their impact on our lives, especially in low-income communities. As humans, we are interdependent, and it is our responsibility to support one another in enhancing our capacity and making life as it’s supposed to be.
As educators, we must believe in our students' immense potential to drive meaningful change both inside and outside their classrooms. We often refer to them as future leaders, but they are the leaders of today, ready to bring continuous positive changes with our help. To nurture their leadership qualities, we must provide them with motivation, guidance, and opportunities to develop new skills and enhance their leadership traits.
