Keeping Children in Schools: Bridging the development and humanitarian education nexus – Lessons learned from the DRC context

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Learning, education, and schooling in conflict settings

Proposal

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been at the centre of a protracted complex crisis for over 30 years. Successive wars and waves of violence have plagued the East of the country for decades and more recently the centre of the country has found itself in the centre of an intense conflict. As this conflict has been ongoing for such a long period of time, and violence in many areas comes and goes, it can be possible to simultaneously be operating education in emergencies interventions and development interventions in the same areas. Increasingly there has been a focus on ensuring that emergency interventions have plans to phase into development by trying to make their interventions sustainable. While this is important it should be noted that education in emergencies funding tends to be short term and not focused on systems-changing interventions. This attempt to bridge emergency interventions into development interventions has been met with limited success in the DRC as emergency interventions often are not fully integrated into national education systems.
As a response to this limited success, Save the Children, through its DFID-funded Girls Education Challenge (GEC) REALISE project, is trying to bridge the nexus but from the starting point of formal schools in the national education system by making them resilient and able to adapt in conflict situations. Schools in DRC have developed coping mechanisms as a result of years of conflict, these include relocation and running double cohorts to welcome displaced children. While REALISE as a project was designed to work with schools in a development setting the program was also designed with activities to build resilience in schools to respond to conflict and support children affected by conflict. The project also has an emergency strategy that allows it to adapt programming within schools that are affected by conflict and emergencies phasing in and out emergency education activities as required by contextual fluidity. This adaptation in maintaining support to schools that already have a longstanding institutional presence, could support increasing sustainability of education in all contexts. By supporting overall sustainability and resilience in schools, as well as emergency preparedness, schools are more equipped to respond to emergencies and continuity can be maintained. Additionally, by strengthening existing education institutions in conflict we are not creating temporary structures that leach support from the formal system that already is developing in a fragile state context. The discussion for this panel presentation will explore lessons learned in implementing this type of intervention and seek new input on how to better support education institution to face conflict.

Author

• Nicole Jacqueline Iafolla, Save the Children International in DRC