COVID-19 Education Emergency Response: A Comparative Analysis of Education Cannot Wait and the Global Partnership for Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: International Organizations and Education Policy: Crisis, Collaboration, and Coloniality

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated emergency education responses around the world. In effect, all education systems were operating in a state of emergency as a result of pandemic policy responses. The two global funds for education - Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) have played important advocacy, policy and financing roles in the context of the pandemic in low- and middle-income countries (GPE) and humanitarian contexts (ECW). The purpose of the current study is to understand how ECW and GPE – as global partnerships, navigated the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries and in contexts of existing emergencies and crises.
The paper presents the findings of comparative analysis of ECW and GPE’s work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three primary questions guide the research: 1) How did ECW and GPE respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? 2) How and why did the COVID-19 pandemic change or otherwise influence the work of ECW and GPE? 3) How do the pandemic responses of ECW and GPE compare in terms of policy advocacy and working with partners (international and local) both during and after the acute phase of the COVID-19 emergency. Together these questions guide an analysis of organizational change and continuity, as well as the motivations, logic, and evidence informing the work of ECW and GPE in response to the pandemic. An inductive thematic analysis approach (Boyatzis, 1998) is used to interpret data from two sources: document review and key informant interviews with ECW and GPE staff and leadership.
The research is situated in conversation with theory and evidence related to the roles and behaviours of international organizations (IOs) – in this case, multistakeholder global pooled funds (Menashy, 2019) - in educational development and change, and particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Debre & Dijkstra, 2021; Shultz & Viczko, 2021). This body of literature discusses how IOs have understood, framed, and responded to COVID-19-related educational crises (Morris et al., 2022). The mantra of “Build Back Better” (BBB) became an inescapable part of IO discourse; however, how BBB would be operationalized, what it would require of partners, what education futures were imagined and pursued, and whose agendas and interests are prioritized have become key points of debate in the literature (Lipscy, 2020; Morris et al., 2022).
Argued is that ECW and GPE’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reflect elements of both change and continuity. The analysis will describe both organizations’ framing of COVID-19 education crises in their respective contexts, explore their priorities and the nature and scope of response activities, as well as probe the motivations, logic, and evidence driving processes of change and continuity in the organizations. On one hand, the urgency of the crisis spurred an increase in ECW’s and GPE’s fundraising activities and efforts to open up new windows for response financing. On the other hand, several years later, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rhetoric of BBB is almost non-existent in the work and publications of ECW and GPE.

Author

• Caroline Manion, OISE, University of Toronto