The GSC Annual Meeting 2020 Open Space session on Strategizing fire safety in shelter and settlements was led by Danielle Antonellis. 

Key take-aways:

• Improving fire safety is a matter of accountability to affected populations who don’t have the means to protect themselves, especially vulnerable groups such as children, women, the elderly, and persons with disabilities. There is limited advocacy on this issue, and even more limited guidance and tools on fire risk reduction, despite significant deaths, injuries and losses to fire in humanitarian contexts. 
• There are many ways fire safety can be improved through Shelter & Settlements programming. There are lessons to be learned from past fire incidents, case studies (e.g. fire risk assessment and response in Lebanon), and through collaboration with fire safety professionals (firefighters, fire safety engineers, etc.). There is a need to collect existing evidence and insights from GSC and other clusters, and to identify gaps/opportunities for future work - i.e. State of Fire Safety in Humanitarian Sector project. 
• Our goal is to develop best practice to reduce deaths, injuries and losses from fire in humanitarian contexts through inter-agency and inter-cluster coordination. To do this work, we need a mechanism that enables peer to peer learning and engagement with a wide range of stakeholders and agencies.

Presentations and Publications of the meeting

• GSC Meeting - Fire Safety Presentation (pdf)

Participants and Feedback

• Participants List