Taking Stock of What We Know and Identifying Evidence Gaps in Education Research in Conflict and Crisis Settings

• In Event: Towards a Coherent, Rigorous and Comprehensive Body of Education Research Evidence for Uptake in Conflict and Crisis Settings

Proposal

In 2023, Education Cannot Wait estimated that there are 224 million children affected by conflict and crisis, 72 million who are out of school, and nearly 127 million who are in school but not achieving minimum proficiency levels in math or reading. Answering the call to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all children in conflict and crisis settings requires evidence on what works, for whom, how, at what cost, and under what conditions. However, the available evidence is scarce, disjointed, often lacks rigor, and too often does not inform policy and practice.
The Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC) program is a multi-country research project that seeks to address these problems by building a rigorous and body of research evidence on the most effective approaches for improving access, quality, and continuity of education, and for supporting coherence in the political economy of education systems, to ultimately improve the children’s holistic learning outcomes and development in conflict and crisis settings. ERICC aims to bridge research, practice, and policy with accessible and actionable knowledge — at local, national, regional, and global levels — through the co-construction of demand-driven research agendas for uptake built through collaborative partnerships. In this presentation, we will share findings from a global evidence review and a research agenda-setting process conducted as part of the ERICC project.
We conducted a review of existing research evidence in education in conflict and protracted crisis settings identifying over 350 high-quality quantitative and qualitative studies, by conducting searching databases, reviewing existing systematic reviews, and consulting websites of organizations known for conducting research in education in conflict and crisis areas. We coded selected high-quality studies against the Education Research in Conflict & Protracted Crisis’s (ERICC) Conceptual Framework and Airbel Impact Lab’s research methods approach, to organize the information in a coherent way and to more easily identify existing gaps in our knowledge about what drives meaningful change in education systems and child outcomes in conflict and protracted crisis contexts.
We also mapped key global-level stakeholders who are influential and highly engaged in the field of education in emergencies and invited 40 of them to participate in key informant interviews, asking them to help us identify the research questions for which the field needs urgent answers. We collated the data and developed a list of research questions, which we also coded against ERICC’s conceptual framework. In the upcoming months, we will be conducting a prioritization exercise with these stakeholders, to identify global-level priority research questions according to a set of criteria. The findings from both pieces of work will inform the development of a global research agenda which we will share as a global public good to guide stakeholders and researchers, and will also guide the work of the ERICC project.

Authors

• Silvia Diazgranados, International Rescue Committee

• Bernard Thuo, International Rescue Committee

• Ismael L Hammoudi, International Rescue Committee