Fund Resilience, Not Disasters: Building Safer Schools and Resilient Education Systems

Every year, disasters put millions of children’s learning at risk and cost education systems an estimated US $35.9 billion in damages and recovery costs. Without preparedness and resilience, repeated shocks and stresses, from climate impacts to conflict and violence, health outbreaks, and natural hazards — threaten to deepen an already severe global education crisis.

In 2024, 242 million children experienced disruptions to their learning due to climate impacts such as floods, storms, and extreme heat. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, schooling was interrupted for 1.6 billion learners worldwide. In 2022–2023, an average of eight attacks on education were recorded every day, jeopardizing the safety of learners and teachers. All-hazard and all-risk approaches support schools and education systems to prepare themselves for these disasters according to risk mapping using a comprehensive lens. 

The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction 2025 theme “Fund Resilience, Not Disasters” calls for precisely this shift: from reactive emergency response to proactive, risk-informed investment in sustainable and resilient education systems.

Building resilience in the education sector is not only a matter of infrastructure — it is an equity and rights imperative. Evidence shows that investments in resilient schools can yield significant dividends: every US $1 invested in resilient infrastructure can save US $4 in reconstruction and recovery costs, while climate-resilient school investments have already saved countries more than US $2.5 billion in potential damages. Simply put, funding resilience means funding the right to education, protecting both the present and the future.

Education as a Driver of Resilience

Education systems are powerful engines of resilience. Safe and inclusive schools protect lives, sustain learning, and hold communities together before, during, and after crises. Recovery truly begins when students return to class — schools are often the first sign of hope and the backbone of community organization.

Yet education remains one of the most underfunded areas in national Disaster Risk Reduction and climate adaptation efforts. Closing this gap means connecting humanitarian response, education in emergency (EiE) expertise, and long-term resilience planning — a bridge that INEE and GADRRRES are uniquely positioned to build together.

From Frameworks to Action: Bridging Agendas for Resilient Education

The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction may have just passed, but its 2025 theme — “Fund Resilience, Not Disasters” — continues to resonate across the education community this October. The message is clear: it’s time to move from frameworks to action. Two key frameworks guide this shift — the INEE Minimum Standards for Education and the Comprehensive School Safety Framework (CSSF).

The INEE Minimum Standards for Education set out global benchmarks for providing safe, relevant, and quality education before, during, and after crises. They help ensure continuity of learning through coordinated, inclusive, and community-led approaches.

The CSSF, meanwhile, provides an all-hazards framework that protects learners and schools through three pillars: safe learning facilities, school disaster management, and risk reduction education. It helps governments and partners translate policy commitments into concrete, risk-informed actions.

The CSSF and INEE Minimum Standards for Education together provide the foundation for this shift, linking humanitarian response, preparedness, and recovery into one continuum of resilience. To make resilience a lived reality, collaboration must go deeper. It is not enough for frameworks to exist; they must speak to each other, and shape how education systems plan, budget, and deliver learning before, during, and after crises.

Together, the CSSF and INEE Minimum Standards for Education offer a roadmap — but the real challenge lies in putting them into practice. Turning global frameworks into meaningful, local action requires collaboration, shared learning, and community leadership. To explore how this can be achieved, we answer a few questions below. 

Questions

1. Why do silos exist between Education in Emergencies (EiE), Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA), and how can they limit the resilience of education systems? 

The gaps between EiE, DRR, and CCA are real and persistent. Specialists from each sector often come from different professional backgrounds, so collaboration is limited. Each sector uses its own technical language, which can create misunderstandings. Limited awareness of what other sectors are doing often leads to duplicated or even competing efforts. On top of that, these sectors often align with different authorities within government structures. For example, DRR may sit under civil protection, CCA under environment or climate ministries, and EiE under education or humanitarian offices. This fragmented institutional alignment further entrenches silos, when in reality what is needed is intersectional coordination around school safety and resilience.

The impact is clear: resources and technical support are spread thin, and education systems remain vulnerable when crises strike. Children’s learning, teacher safety, and community resilience all suffer when EiE, DRR, and CCA operate in isolation.

Bridging these divides is exactly where GADRRRES and INEE can make a difference. Some concrete steps include:

• Providing integrated guidance and tools: By combining the Comprehensive School Safety Framework and INEE Minimum Standards for Education into practical toolkits, ministries and schools can plan for all hazards in ways that are realistic, context-specific, and inclusive.
• Sharing lessons and evidence: Peer learning platforms and country case studies show the tangible benefits of integrated approaches, making the case for long-term investment in resilience. Good news: this is already underway!

We have already promising efforts happening, such as the collective work of the GADRRRES regional affiliates, showing what’s possible when agendas align. Our hope is that this serves as an inspiration for even more countries and regions. Read our quick guide on Common Agenda for Delivering School Safety and Resilience here.

2. How can INEE be a strong ally in advancing the implementation of the Comprehensive School Safety Framework (CSSF) — ensuring it goes beyond shaping national policies to reach practitioners, schools, and local organizations through contextualized and locally led approaches?

INEE’s global network of over 22,000 members offers direct access to practitioners who are  translating the CSSF into context-specific action. Some concrete examples of regional and country level CSSF implementation include: :

• INEE and GADRRRES, along with Global Coalition for the Protection of Education from Attack (GCPEA), the Spanish Cooperation, and in collaboration with the Regional Education Group of LAC, are working together to support advancing the school safety agenda in the LAC region and strengthening public policies. A first initiative took place in Colombia in 2024 and a second phase is taking place in Bolivia in 2025. GADRRRES, INEE and GCPEA are also working together to develop short-practical guidelines on how to work locally and regionally around frameworks complementarity.

Through its network and EiE community, INEE helps ensure that the CSSF is not only a policy framework but a living practice embedded in classrooms and communities.

3. What practical steps can ministries of education take to integrate the CSSF and INEE Minimum Standards as complementary frameworks within national policies, education sector plans, and financing mechanisms?

Ministries can take three pragmatic steps:

1. Policy Integration: Embed both frameworks into national Education Sector Plans, School Infrastructure Standards, and DRR/CCA strategies. A number of ministries of education are already doing this including Nigeria, South Sudan, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador among others. Use these frameworks to guide education-related actions in Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans, as well as other relevant climate policy.
2. Budgeting for Resilience: Introduce risk-informed budget lines within sector financing mechanisms, linking preparedness and recovery funds to regular education spending.
3. Capacity and Coordination: Establish national or subnational School Safety and EiE coordination groups, co-chaired by education, DRR, and climate units, using INEE and GADRRRES tools for planning and monitoring.

By harmonizing the CSSF and INEE Minimum Standards, ministries can institutionalize resilience as a core function of education governance.

4. How can GADRRRES and INEE work together to promote anticipatory action as a bridge between humanitarian response and long-term, risk-informed education planning helping systems act before crises disrupt learning?

Anticipatory action is all about helping education systems get ahead of crises instead of just reacting after the fact. By using early-warning systems, climate forecasts, and local community data, education authorities can pre-position learning materials, train teachers, and make sure school facilities are safe.

In Bangladesh, anticipatory actions were implemented ahead of Cyclone Remal in May 2024. These measures included strengthening school infrastructure, enhancing early warning systems, and engaging communities in preparedness activities. By acting ahead of the disaster, the country was able to safeguard educational facilities and maintain access to learning, demonstrating the effectiveness of anticipatory action in reducing educational disruptions during natural hazards. 

This is where GADRRRES and INEE can really work together. By bringing EiE expertise into school safety and education planning, we can make sure learning continues, reduce losses, and help governments explore innovative ways to finance preparedness—so being ready isn’t an extra cost but part of the plan.

5.  What can DRR and climate practitioners in education learn from the Education in Emergencies community’s decades of experience in preparedness, continuity of learning, and inclusive education delivery?

The EiE community brings decades of experience in continuity of learning, community engagement, and inclusive delivery — lessons invaluable to DRR and climate actors. Key takeaways include:

• Preparedness as practice: Building teacher and school capacity for continuity planning, not just emergency response. The Global Policy Survey on the Comprehensive School Safety Framework (2024) shows that only 16% of governments report mandatory teacher training on DRR, and just 18% include climate change adaptation in compulsory teacher professional development. Moreover, only 11% of governments carry out teacher development or assessment specifically in these areas. These findings indicate that while many countries are beginning to embed disaster risk, climate change and environmental sustainability into curricula, the capacity of teachers to translate this knowledge into practice and to address both climate and disaster risks in a coherent way remains critically underdeveloped.
• Inclusion as resilience: Designing interventions that account for gender, disability, displacement, and language barriers.
• Local ownership: Empowering communities and learners to lead risk assessment and recovery processes, ensuring solutions endure beyond projects.

By integrating these principles, DRR and climate practitioners can strengthen education’s role as both a protective and transformative force.

Protect the Present, Secure the Future

As the IDDRR 2025 reminds us, the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of preparedness. Investing in resilience, through safe schools, trained teachers, and risk-informed systems — is an investment in the right to learn. 

By combining the Comprehensive School Safety Framework with INEE’s EiE expertise, the education community can move from reaction to anticipation and preparation, ensuring that schools everywhere are ready not just to withstand disasters but to thrive beyond them.