Stuck in the Middle: Teachers at the Nexus of Humanitarian and Development Aid – the Case of PlayMatters

• In Event: Tensions in Supporting Teachers and Teacher Professional Development Across the Humanitarian-Development Nexus

Proposal

The protracted and complex nature of contemporary conflict and crisis has led record numbers of children and youth to seek schooling while forcibly displaced from their homes (UNHCR, 2022). In these contexts, numerous humanitarian, development, and government actors – often with competing mandates, priorities, and structures – work towards providing education for these children and youth (INEE, 2021; Mendenhall, 2019). In response to losses in aid effectiveness, lack of coordination, and the unsustainability of interventions, there are increasing global calls to strengthen humanitarian-development coherence (World Bank, 2017; OCHA, 2017). We draw on Nicolai et al.'s (2019) definition of coherence as a comprehensive way to describe the linkages between humanitarian and development assistance to deliver cost effective and sustainable education results, and situate teachers and teacher education as an important mechanism to examine the opportunities and barriers in strengthening coherence in refugee hosting contexts. Through a comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016) we ask, How can teacher professional development initiatives in refugee hosting contexts navigate humanitarian-development coherence in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda?

Drawing on the case of PlayMatters (PM), a teacher professional development (TPD) initiative aiming to cultivate holistic learning and well-being for more than 800,000 refugee and host-community children in refugee hosting contexts across Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda, this research addresses knowledge gaps across two bodies of literature. First, while there has been extensive research on the efficacy of TPD in low and middle-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Howell & Sayed, 2018; Popova, Evans, Breeding & Arancibia, 2022; Sayed & Bulgrin, 2020), little attention has been paid to understanding how TPD initiatives can address the humanitarian-development nexus in refugee hosting contexts and across varying commitments to refugee inclusion. Second, recent studies on humanitarian-development coherence in education (e.g., INEE, 2021; Mendenhall, 2019; Nicolai et al., 2019) do not address how specific education or TPD programs and policies address coherence in line with the 'New Ways of Working' and the global policy priority to include refugees in national education systems.

This comparative case study examines how global, regional, national, and local actors (vertical) collaborate across refugee and host communities in PM’s three country contexts (horizontal) over the course of the PM initiative (temporal) to better understand the opportunities and challenges for bridging the humanitarian-development divide. The cases provide a useful point of comparison as the three countries represent a spectrum of refugee inclusion in national systems: From attending public schools (Uganda), to attending UN/INGO managed schools using host country curriculum (Ethiopia), to attending segregated schools using home curricula (Tanzania). Comparison across countries sheds light on how different national policy environments related to refugee inclusion impact barriers and opportunities for TPD coherence.

This research draws on semi-structured interviews (n=35) with non-state and ministry actors engaged in the PM project implementation at global, regional, and national levels. Our findings have implications for policy and practice to ensure TPD initiatives address humanitarian-development coherence in ways that support system strengthening, provide for long-term sustainable support for teachers, and are cost effective.

Authors

• Arianna Pacifico, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Rena Deitz, New York University

• Danielle Lorber Falk, International Rescue Committee (IRC)

• Anne C Smiley, IRC