Going to Scale and Building the Capacity of Humanitarian Staff to Assess the Education Needs of IDPs

• In Event: INEE Data and Evidence Collaborative: Education Data for Internally Displaced Persons

Proposal

In the past few years, the Global Education Cluster has strived to develop practical tools to assess the nature and extent of education needs of IDPs, and to facilitate the implementation of these tools in emergency contexts, while building the capacity of field workers to do needs assessments and analysis. The tools developed by the GEC include the Guide to Coordinated EiE Joint Education Needs Assessments and Analysis (JENAs), a guide and workbook to measure severity of IDP conditions through data from the Displacement Tracking Matrix (in partnership with IOM) and a guide to calculate numbers of and severity of humanitarian conditions for IDPs. These efforts can be used in complement to those developed by other actors such as REACH with the Multi-Sectoral Needs Assessments (MSNAs), and other individual agencies’ assessments and analysis. The majority of these tools have been developed in a way that allows comparison with and contribution to the Joint Inter-Sectoral Analysis Framework, which is the new reference for setting the number of people in need in HNOs-HRPs, and as such will inform strategic decisions by Humanitarian Country Teams.

Meanwhile, the number and percentage of countries with IDPs who do implement JENAs remained limited in 2020 (seven countries, that is a quarter of all countries where clusters are activated) and the number of cluster and partners’ staff who benefited from the GEC capacity building is below 100 globally. Further, certain aspects of conducting education needs assessments remain challenging. Very few countries implement JENAs with participation of children, due to the additional resources and expertise required for this. Additionally, coordination and alignment of data collected by humanitarian actors and systems already established by the government is often less than optimal.

This presentation will therefore outline the necessary conditions and use of such assessments in one country (Burkina Faso) and explore options for going to scale with needs assessments and analysis that are representative at the national level. Such options include a more systematic engagement and advocacy with country clusters and humanitarian partners, building the information management capacity of national staff, proposing “light-weight” solutions to countries who don’t much time and capacity (secondary data reviews) increasing partnerships with other agencies and organizations who specialize in assessments, and encouraging collaboration between country Education Clusters and Ministries of Education on EMIS. While such efforts must be made at the country level, the GEC and other panel members will also propose ways towards coming to an agreed set of severity and response indicators for EiE assessments and analysis, which can be broadly used by agencies, facilitate interoperability between datasets and the production of information on IDP education.

Authors

• Nicolas Servas, Global Education Cluster

• Chloe Goldthorpe, REACH Initiative