Resumen de A decision-making framework for physical school infrastructure improvement

Rafael Ignacio Fernández Miranda

• English

  School infrastructure affects the quality of learning and performance of children and youth. Particularly, in the Latin-American and Caribbean context, natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods, and landslides, threaten school facilities. Additionally, problems related to the functionality of these facilities are common in the region, such as an inadequate number of classrooms, lack of recreation and leisure spaces, poor lighting and ventilation, old furniture, and deficient connectivity. At a national level, the decision-making process to prioritize schools' interventions becomes even more challenging due to limited resources and lack of information. We propose a decision-making framework that prioritizes school infrastructure investment with limited budgets, using clustering procedures, a multi-criteria utility function, and an optimization component. This framework allows better public policy decisions and benefits students in terms of infrastructure quality with a multicriteria perspective, improving both safety and functional conditions. We illustrate the framework with a case study applied to the public school infrastructure in the Dominican Republic and Cali.

• English

  This study was developed under a project in the Dominican Republic funded by the Global Program for Safer Schools (GPSS) of The World Bank.

  Partially funded by the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering.

• English

  Ph.D. thesis document by Rafael Fernández in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in Engineering.