Hello everyone,
Please allow me to give a somewhat lengthy background.
I'm a Singaporean-Australian who worked in an Indian NGO for about 2 years. I was a policy consultant and worked on the National School Safety Programme. On my field trips to schools, and while collating the safety data sheets and reports for my colleagues, I realised that there were a lot of impracticalities, like no centralised system for holding the data from schools, the manual process of entering data, the inability to properly analyse the data, erroneous data collection, and so on.
I then had this idea of developing a school safety database but never acted on it - let's just say being a non-techie I was only starting to discover the potential of IT and data management. But now I know what can be done and and would really like to make this happen. The kind of things we look at for school safety are structural hazards, the number of toilets, evacuation procedures and areas, kitchen safety and fire extinguishers. Of course school safety can extend beyond the confines of the school to its surrounding areas and can also have intangible aspects.
Not only would having a database greatly streamline the data collection process, it would also help decision makers, NGOs etc visualise which areas have the most school safety problems, the number of critical schools, levels of compliance with safety standards, all of which leads to better allocation of resources.
I would to discuss this more with any interested datameeters. I've left the NGO sector but still remain very deeply interested in its social issues. I'm currently based in Bangalore. For all I know, by now there already is a centralised database for school safety used internally by the NDMA, UNICEF or other government organisations - my research shows there isn't though but it would be good to affirm this.
Please message me if you're interested, and thank you.
Hutch