Building Resilience: The Untapped Power of Education in Post-Disaster Reconstruction.
Post-disaster reconstruction offers a critical window to not only rebuild but also to enhance resilience against future disasters. This research highlights the vital, yet often underexplored, role of education and skills development in this process.
Post-disaster reconstruction is a vital phase in the disaster management cycle, potentially offering the opportunity to build back better and prevent or mitigate future disasters. Successful reconstruction requires many resources, including skills.
We review the literature related to the role of education in post-disaster reconstruction in two steps. First, we summarize the skills-focused literature on disaster management—covering all phases of disasters—and introduce the varying roles of formal, non-formal, and informal education in reconstruction. In this step, we identify six main skill domains that are especially important for post-disaster reconstruction: healthcare, construction, security, business and administration, and governmental.
In the second step, we systematically review the literature on the post-disaster reconstruction phase. We draw a sample of 489 sources that do not focus on skills, then use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze how often those sources reference skills in each key domain and all forms of education.
We find that the literature describes all disaster types and has a global scope, although Africa is under-represented. High- and middle-income countries are well represented, while low-income countries are not. Sources are published in physical and social sciences journals, with none in education journals.
Every key skill domain is mentioned, especially business and administration, and construction. Nearly all sources refer to education, but mostly forms that overlap with formal education. The potential of informal and non-formal education is underexplored in the literature.
Social sciences scholars can help address these gaps by contributing to the field of post-disaster reconstruction, where they are currently absent.