This report provides a broad review of the field of education in fragile states and charts a new agenda for maximizing education’s contribution to the development and well-being of people living in these contexts. Recommendations made are based on evidence developed both from the analysis and synthesis of the latest available data as well as primary research.
Its key findings are that there is compelling evidence showing that education can play an important role for accelerating progress in fragile states for four main reasons:
- Economic growth and poverty reduction (economic development),
- Children’s protection and well-being in and after emergencies (humanitarian action),
- Peacebuilding and statebuilding (security), and
- Reducing risks from and building resilience to disasters and climate change.
Maximizing the contributions education can make in these four areas requires a fuller understanding of the ways in which education can contribute to social change than is typically used by policy-makers. This requires the recognition that over and above the important role of service delivery and skills development in fragile contexts, education can play an influential role in such things as shaping collective identities, sanctioning norms and behaviors, and developing individual agency. These four reasons have been used as a framework for analysing the current status of the field of education in fragile states and for recommending the future directions needed to fully leverage education’s contributions in fragile states and beyond.
Big progress in advancing education in fragile states will not be made by investing heavily in these areas of existing strength. Instead progress will come by building on these assets and directly addressing remaining gaps. The research found that the potential to fully leveraging education’s contribution to the needs of fragile states is held back by at least four main challenges, including:
- Coordination gaps among development, humanitarian, security, and disaster risk reduction (DRR) actors: There are a wide range of actors that influence the continuity of education in fragile states and rarely is their work brought together coherently at the country level.
- Low policy priority: At the national and global levels, policy-makers across the development, humanitarian, security, and DRR arenas do not place sufficient attention to continuing education amid fragility.
- Limited financing: Low prioritization by policy makers leads to insufficient financing for the sector and what external financing does exist is limited by aid modalities that are better suited for stable contexts.
- Insufficient attention to quality: Education’s full potential for advancing the welfare of people in fragile states will only be fulfilled, like in any contexts, when it is of reasonably good quality, however quality learning lags far behind in these contexts with limited attention from policy-makers who are heavily focused on restoring access to education.
Ultimately, the report recommends that to harness the power of education in developing fragile states, the field must move into a fourth phase: integration. Integrating the concern for education in fragile states across development, humanitarian, security, and DRR actors is crucial for ensuring continuity of quality education at scale. The involvement across these sets of actors is needed because the contexts in which they work are frequently overlapping. This means development actors have to think and act differently on fragility issues and humanitarian, security, and DRR actors have to do the same for education issues.
The report outlines specific actions needed to move into a fourth phase and scale up the ability of education to contribute to fragile states’ development. This includes scaling up the field’s vision, policy prioritization, financing, and attention to quality. For example, all actors can advance the continuity of the provision of quality education in support of development, humanitarian, security, and DDR-related goals by adopting the common conceptual framework of reducing risk and increasing resilience through education. This goal is relevant in all contexts, whether a country faces times of peace and stability, crisis, recovery, or a combination. Sharing these goals and framework can promote deeper coordination and longer-term thinking at country and global level, but does not preclude the need for specialized tools that give guidance on how to respond to particular contexts, for instance for response after an earthquake versus during a protracted civil conflict.