Teachers undergo disaster management training exercise

AT least 3 500 teachers from Mashonaland West Province are set to benefit from a national programme in disaster risk management and first aid training being conducted by the Zimbabwe Red Cross Society (ZRCS).

In an interview in Chinhoyi last week, ZRCS national disaster management officer, Mr Hopewell Munyari, said the project sought to prepare the nation for future disasters.

“We are conducting training for teachers on how to tackle disaster risk management issues within the school set up. Environmental changes across the globe have been a cause for concern of late and we decided to capacitate our teachers with the appropriate knowledge on disaster risk management,” he said.

“We started with Manicaland and moved onto Mashonaland East and North respectively and now we are in this province.”

Mr Munyari said they were training at least three teachers per school.

“We are training at least three to four teachers per school and considering the number of schools in the province, we are training approximately 3 500. But ideally we were supposed to train all teachers,” he said. Mr Munyari said in Mashonaland West province, the trainings were being done one district after the other.

“We are moving from one district to the other; here we started with Makonde district and the next destination will guided by the provincial district officers,” he said.

Mr Munyari said the trainings were covering disaster issues affecting both rural and urban schools and would in turn save Government funds, which it used to direct to disaster issues.

“In urban areas, there are more of technological issues affecting them than rural areas where infrastructural ones are topical. Government is likely to make a saving considering that schools will now be able to manage on their own during disasters,” he said.

Mr Munyari said the trainings were also playing a complementary role to the new school curriculum.

“The country’s new education curriculum puts more emphasis on the need to have safer schools through encompassing disaster risk management training in all the subjects; therefore, this is just a complementary role we are playing,” he said.

ZRCS Mashonaland West provincial manager Mr Amon Choba said the training was welcome considering the Banket Primary School disaster, which destroyed a girl’s hostel recently.

“On October 15 a Banket Primary School was gutted down by fire and the response left a lot to be desired.”