With the recent widespread recognition of the importance of integrating disaster risk reduction in education, different stakeholders have been embarking in school safety programming. National and regional school safety practitioners, including different government agencies coordinate and report separately to the disaster management and education sector for school safety initiatives, which unwittingly creates overlap and inefficiency in efforts.

To guide the direction of ASSI in alignment with the commitments to the AADMER Work Programme 2016-2020 and the ASEAN Work Plan for the Education Sector 2016-2020, the ASSI Programme Strategy 2017-2020 (Annex 1) was developed. This programme strategy emphasizes five technical thrusts to ensure technically sound, comprehensive, and sustainable school safety implementation in the region. One of these main thrusts is “Supporting the development of Member State-driven inter-sectoral leadership and coordinating structure for ASSI.” This thrust aims to encourage inter-sectoral coordination and collaboration and ensures ASSI implementation is always in coherence with the priorities and strategies of the Member States and the region. At the same time, this thrust also intends to promote sustainability and enable scalability of school safety good practices in the region.

This mechanism is proposed to support the scaling up of the ASSI implementation and for sustaining the efforts in the region. It also intends to contribute in the strengthening of government leadership in school safety programming to ensure coordinated and technically-informed initiatives by different government agencies and other stakeholders or actors in ASEAN.