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A workshop of the  Working Group "Promoting Safer Building" takes place in CRAterre-ENSAG on October 2018, the 25 &#38; 26th.The Working Group "Promoting Safer Building" is an activity endorsed by the Global Shelter Cluster. It is formed of members from a diversity of agencies and organisations, and includes some academics and independent practitioners.It is co-led by CARE International UK and CRAterre. The group is connected to a wider Promoting Safer Building Consortium that has several interconnected projects seeking to better understand self-recovery, safer building and the improvement of humanitarian shelter response after disasters. http://promotingsaferbuilding.org/Background to PSB andself-recovery:Poorly constructed buildings are often the largestcause of serious injury, trauma and death in the event of a natural disaster.After a disaster, most families rebuild their houses relying on their ownresources, with little or no support from formal institutions or thehumanitarian community. They “self-recover”. An analysis of statistics shows that the impact of aid agencies onhousing recovery rarely reaches more than 20% of affected families and isfrequently in single figures. Moreover, much of that support is in the form oftemporary or transitional housing that is not intended to last more than a fewyears. Therefore, we know that 80%, or more, self-recover.The challenge for the humanitarian community, as wellas national and local institutions, is to support this inevitable process ofself-recovery. Evidence from many post-disaster needs-assessments shows thatfamilies rapidly rebuild with little or no knowledge of safer buildingtechniques. There is also evidence that the demand for technical assistance canbe very high in the early days after a rapid onset disaster. However, as thingsstand, these homes are too often rebuilt using the same pre-disaster badpractice that caused so much death, injury and economic damage in the firstplace.Currently we lack theskills to contextualize each unique situation, arrive rapidly and reliably atkey technical messages and to systematically and effectively transmit thosemessages in an accessible way that allows informed choice and ensures maximumacceptance by the affected population. We know that simply informing peopledoes not result in better, safer building; we also know that there are nouniversal solutions.Manyrecent experiences in Africa, Latin America, Caribbean, and Asia have confirmedthe relevance of a self-recovery approach and of the tools that have beendeveloped so far to support it The recent World Habitat Award won by CAREPhilippines for its post typhoon Haiyan housing project is further testimony tothe impact of this approach. In 2017 / 2018, the Promoting Safer Building Consortium was endorsed by the Global Shelter Cluster as an official Cluster Working Group specifically mandated to address the development of the project’s outputs regarding the understanding and selection of effective and appropriate Build Back Safer messages. For more information: https://www.sheltercluster.org/working-group/promoting-safer-building-wg