News

By Karen Mundy, Director, IIEP-UNESCO

On this International Day of Peace, recognizing the role of education – and planning – in contributing to peace is essential. Crises, both conflicts and disasters due to natural hazards, threaten the future of a generation of learners. Just in the past month, the instability and looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Hurricane Ida in the United States, and the earthquake in Haiti have endangered lives and upended the provision of social services, including education. Globally, COVID-19, climate change, and a refugee crisis remain significant threats to quality education for all. Will the cumulative effect of these crises lead to a tipping point for education, and what can ministries of education do to respond?

Crisis-sensitive educational planning is an essential means for keeping students, teachers, and communities safe, peaceful – and learning. When done systematically and effectively, crisis-sensitive planning can help ministries institutionalize risk reduction and management and ultimately mitigate damage and impact, and in some circumstances, help prevent further crises from occurring. Simultaneous work is also needed, to redress equity and make sure that hard-won gains in education are not lost during a crisis.

To support countries in mainstreaming crisis-sensitive educational planning, a revamped online resource is now available to help guide ministries of education through turbulent times. The website, Education4Resilience, relaunched with support from Education Above All Foundation, offers a wealth of resources, news, and guidance to put crisis-sensitive educational planning into motion. For ministries of education, this entails:

Enhancing capacities for risk management

Ministries of education need to have the capacities to analyze the risks and understand what is at stake during a humanitarian crisis – for example, how many learners or educators could be displaced, or school facilities or textbooks destroyed? In Burkina Faso, for example, the country’s conflict led to the displacement of a record one million people by the end of 2020. Through crisis-sensitive educational planning, the Ministry of Education developed their technical capacities to identify, collect, and analyze emergency related data that could both pinpoint where displaced learners were located and implement strategies to reach them. They also trained teachers to address the psycho-social needs of their students, many of whom had experienced trauma during the crisis.

During COVID-19, understanding the effects of school closures on all children and youth and putting in place COVID-19 response plans to mitigate impact has been paramount for leading a coordinated response for the sector. 

Planning before crises strike

Risk management strategies and plans for the education sector that include prevention and preparedness measures can help education authorities to anticipate crises. Authorities can then put in place measures that address vulnerabilities to potential risks so that they do not have disastrous consequences on education communities. Such strategies should also recognize that crises come in many forms and often impact the most vulnerable first. Therefore, the process of addressing multiple risks faced by a country and its education system needs to include specific measures to ensure equity and inclusiveness for girls, learners with special needs, and communities in situations of displacement. 

Perhaps COVID-19 was a wake-up call: authorities have now realized they must plan for the potential impact of risks long before a crisis occurs. In South America, the Ministry of Education of Guyana recognized the urgency to create a strategy to confront all the risks present in the country. The Ministry team, with technical support from IIEP, created hazard maps for all regions, outlining what was at risk and which strategies could be implemented before hazards occur, in order to ensure continuity of quality education in even the direst circumstances. With floods representing the largest risk to education, affecting some 160,000 students per year, the strategy outlines how to protect education facilities, materials, and ensure continuity of learning in such situations. 

Investing in crisis-sensitive planning

Investing in the protection of education not only saves lives, it can also safeguard financial resources in the long-term. Ministries of education need to work with finance ministries to determine the costs and identify the funding sources available for crisis-sensitive plans and policies prior to their implementation. Cost estimates should span activities related to preparedness (such as training for education managers and teachers or school safety programmes), prevention (such as retrofitting school buildings), and response (such as rehabilitation or reconstruction of schools that might have been destroyed). For situations that lead to displacement, ministries need to know what resources will be required to integrate refugees and internally displaced populations into host community schools.

Putting strategies into action

In addition to securing funding for risk management activities, implementing a plan for risk management requires buy-in at every level of the education system. Organizational capacities of the ministry such as strong communication feedback loops, and collaboration between officers and units to ensure education service delivery during crisis, are also paramount. Also important is putting in place specific organizational units mandated for risk management within a ministry of education, and fostering an organizational culture that encourages flexibility in implementation and remedial actions when challenges arise.  Sufficiently trained personnel must be available to plan for and manage risks, and staff must have the necessary equipment and facilities at their disposal. Finally, a reliable and accessible education management information system (EMIS) that contains information on risks and their potential impacts is an important tool for units tasked with risk management, as their decisions should emerge from an evidence-based understanding of the realities of the education system.

When these capacities exist, ministries of education will ultimately be in a better position to mitigate disastrous consequences for education communities, and to lead crisis response efforts for the sector.

URL:

https://gemreportunesco.wpcomstaging.com/2021/09/21/a-tipping-point-for-education-how-crisis-sensitive-educational-planning-can-secure-learning-for-all/