Saturday, January 18, 2014

Bangladesh teaches disaster preparedness to reduce risk

IRIN: Bangladesh is working to enhance children’s understanding of disaster preparedness with the introduction of 10 new supplementary books for teaching the subject, which has been part of the education curriculum in primary and secondary schools since 2004.

“With these books, students will be taught about disaster… [preparedness] by rhymes and stories, so that they can understand the risks,” Shafikur Rahman, chairman of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB), told IRIN.

In the Bangladesh 2010 National Education Policy disaster preparedness is cited as a core area to be incorporated into the curriculum, “to build students as skilled human resources to fight the challenges of the world threatened by climate change and other natural disasters, and to create in them a social awareness about environment." The Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre lists this low-lying nation of 155 million people as one of the most disaster-prone states in the world, with cyclones entering the Bay of Bengal and making landfall along the Bangladesh coast almost every year.

More than two-thirds of the country’s 64 districts are prone to natural disasters, including cyclones, floods, landslides, tornadoes and drought. The Comprehensive Disaster Management Programme (CDMP) of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief is providing financial and technical support to incorporate disaster preparedness in the Bangladesh school curriculum....
Rural Bangladesh children, shot by Mark Knobil , Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

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