31-07-2017 | di COOPI

Guatemala: schools are ready and organized

Guatemala is a well-stocked country thanks to its position, climate and the presence of different kind of animals; but it is highly vulnerable to environmental menaces and to the interventions of the human being for its topography.

So it is essential to inform the local population about the risks and the damages caused by the ambient or by human's action. COOPI has been present since April 2016 with the project "Increasing community and municipal preparedness and coping capacities to lessen the impacts of multi-hazards disasters in the West Highlands of Guatemala".

The intervention, financed by European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), has been implemented by COOPI in collaboration with the Civil Volunteer Group (GVC), the Experimental Centro para el Desarrollo de la Pequena y la Mediana Empresa Rural (CEDEPEM) and Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (ASB). The aims are:

• to improve local capacities on disaster preparedness and response,
• promoting civic participation in decision-making mechanisms,
• increasing resilience in 4 indigenous municipalities of the Departments of Quetzaltenango and Totonicapan.

The role of the scholastic committees

The sector of education is the one which more suffers the consequences caused by the catastrophes that have hit constantly the country, because the scholastic infrastructures are often damaged by earthquakes, fires, floods or landslides.

Every school has to prepare and to have at disposal a security plan, written together with the commission of evacuation. COOPI intervenes with its partners in four commons so that the scholastic committees for the reduction of the risks and the disasters are adequately formed and can elaborate plans of answer which allow the organization, the prevention, the mitigation and the preparation for the emergency interventions.

The involved scholastic committees will be 20 and the process of formation will concern fathers, mothers, students, headmasters and teachers of all the schools. Moreover will be kept standard forms of first aid and sessions of evacuation, search and rescue of the victims in case of fire, cured by fire brigades.

Now the scholastic committees are undertaken to develop the plan of answer for schools, and with the aim to value the functionality COOPI provides to make simulations in the centres of formation, in coordination with the local and communal authorities, involving the whole community.