Biljana Karovska Andonovska, PhD, Nikola Kletnikov, MSc and Metodija Dojchinovski, PhD
Military Academy “General Mihailo Apostolski”- Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia

Part of the book: The Challenges of Disaster Planning, Management, and Resilience

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discover the level of knowledge that vulnerable groups such as children, youth, as well as persons (students) with special needs, from North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Spain have in relation to the protection and rescue system and their needs for training improvement. The fact that very often vulnerable groups are neglected in every stage of the disaster risk management motivated us to conduct this research and to contribute to building stronger and more inclusive community resilience. In this research we used the quantitative research method (a questionnaire) answered by vulnerable groups, separately in each of these countries. In our research we respected gender equality and we have almost the same distribution of female and male respondents. The questionnaire consisted of 19 questions, 3 of them were open-ended, the other 16 close ended. The first 6 questions related to general information about the participants, whereas the other refer to the 5 specific areas of our research. The conclusion from the research is that most of the participants are not familiar with the possible ways to give alerts for the dangers, the instructions for protection, rescue, assistance, and they need training about possible ways to report and warn about dangers, give instructions on protection, rescue, and assistance. The results were very useful for creating a novel approach for developing educational materials and training programs for children, youth, and persons with disabilities using an open educational platform, Mobile APP, and gamification.

Keywords: knowledge, protection and rescue, inclusion, vulnerable groups, resilience

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