ISLAMABAD, May 16: A three-day international conference on school safety concluded here on Friday with the declaration that “school safety needs to become a national priority” for communities and governments everywhere.

“Schools are multi-functional assets for communities. Schools are places of learning, community activities and can be safe havens in times of disaster,” declared the three-day conference held as part of the celebrations of Karim Aga Khan’s Golden Jubilee.

Communities play a critical role as first responders to disaster situations and as such are tools for local governments to translate and implement locally appropriate action plans that involve community in disaster management, planning, finance and safe construction, said the declaration.

It was prepared by representatives of Pakistan’s education ministry and the Institute of Architects, the World Bank group, United Nations agencies, the Austrian Development Association, Swiss Development Agency, the Aga Khan Development Network and others.

These agencies are involved in the massive reconstruction work in northern Pakistan and Azad Kashmir which were devastated in 2005 by an earthquake. Nearly 75,000 people were killed by the quake, of them 17,000 were school-age children. Another 20,000 children were wounded. Only a few hundred of the 9,000 schools in the area survived the destructive force of that earthquake.

Speakers who quoted these harrowing figures also referred to the May 12 earthquake in China as a reminder of the need for policy and private and public sector engagement and investment to make schools more resilient to earthquake and other hazards.

Mr Salvano Briceno, director of the secretariat of UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), told the closing ceremony that vulnerability to earthquakes was still a main cause of deaths in disasters.

“Critical infrastructures need to be systematically upgraded and retrofitted in earthquake prone areas, if want to save lives,” he said.

“Fortunately,” the declaration said, “there now exist ample information in the form of knowledge and technologies for making schools safer well within the affordability of governments and communities alike.”

It called upon national governments to develop a school safety policy as part of their national development plan that is proactive.

“School safety policies should reflect local physical and socio-cultural realities, and priorities of state and local entities,” the declaration asserted.

Earlier Swiss ambassador Markus Peter had stressed on the conference that “we can only create safer schools by involving all parties concerned — the state, the engineers, the students, the teachers, the parents, the architects, the environmentalists to name just a few. They all have to agree if, how and when a school is safe”.

The conference, sponsored by the Aga Khan Planning and Building Services (AKPBS,P) and Focus Humanitarian Assistance, the two affiliate agencies of AKDN, as part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Imamat of Prince Karim Aga Khan, set out guidelines for each partner in the endeavour to make schools safe and multi-functional.

It proposed that national governments in partnership with local authorities create a National School Safety Programme and Fund to implement action plans. As the regulatory body for the private schools, it said, the national government should ensure that private sector schools raise their standards to be safe schools within the five years.

Local governments should develop school safety action plans that are formulated in consultation with communities and address their priorities within the framework of the national plan, the declaration said.

It said the civil society should train people in evacuation and create student safety corps and parent support teams as first responders o disaster events.

PML-N leader Ahsan Iqbal, who was the chief guest at the concluding session, stated that “the plethora of recommendations (by the conference) would mean institutionalising the concept of school safety, integrating it as part of policy, embracing technical recommendations, developing skills for executing safer buildings, integrating disaster management in formal and informal education as well as ensuring that communities are prepared for disaster”.