About Us

Communities in Southeast Asia continue to face increasing risks from typhoons, floods, earthquakes, and other climate-related hazards. In the Philippines and Laos, these events regularly disrupt education, livelihoods, and essential services, highlighting long-standing gaps in disaster preparedness at the household, school, and community levels.

While disaster education is widely recognized as a critical component of risk reduction, its availability and standards remain uneven. Many learning opportunities rely on one-time orientations, technical language, or formats that do not reflect how people actually receive information or make decisions during emergencies. These limitations affect the broader population, but they are especially pronounced for persons with disabilities, whose disaster-related risks are significantly higher due to inaccessible warnings, difficult evacuation routes, and limited involvement in preparedness planning.

These challenges are not the result of disability itself, but of how educational services and preparedness systems are designed and delivered. When disaster education does not account for varied learning needs and real-life conditions, households and communities are left without practical guidance on how to act safely. Addressing this gap requires improving both the reach and the quality of disaster education, particularly by equipping young people to translate knowledge into action within their own contexts.

Project ARES responds to the regional challenge of Improving Availability and Standards of Educational Services by strengthening youth-focused disaster education that connects climate risks, community realities, and leadership in action.