Classes continue in Beira after cyclone Idai in difficult conditions

By Denis McClean

BEIRA, 30 September 2019 - At the best of times, children in Mozambique struggle to attend school up to the age of 13 when poverty often blocks a move to high school.  

At the worst of times, they sit in hot tents or in cyclone or flood shattered buildings with the roof and windows gone.

Even in a normal year, the country loses 600 classrooms to weather events and Cyclone Idai last March destroyed or damaged over 4,000, putting enormous pressure on the surviving facilities to cater to one of the youngest populations in Africa.

The Escola Completa 25 de Junho in Beira caters to 4,871 students aged six to 12 in four three-hour shifts throughout the day from 7 a.m., according to school principal, Federico Francisco.

Local people have started to call it the “Escola secretario geral" - Portuguese for secretary-general - in honour of the recent visit there by UN chief, Antonio Gutteres, who drew attention to a pavilion of three classrooms that withstood the 220 kph winds of idai, while many other classrooms in the compound lost their roofs. 

Thanks to the work of UN Habitat, the Ministries of Public Works and the Department of Education and support from the World Bank, new standards for resilient school buildings are now being applied in Mozambique.

There is hope that the experience of Cyclone Idai has transmitted the message that it is better to "build to last", the theme of this year’s International Day for Disaster Reduction on October 13.

UN Habitat architect, Fernand Ferreiro, who has worked for 12 years in Mozambique, said a key milestone came in 2016 when wind speed maps were adopted to guide school construction standards. The 93 classrooms that were built to those standards all survived the cyclone.