Save the Children: Learning from an integrated EiE Rapid Response Fund

• In Event: Adapting Learning through Play in Acute Emergencies: Resources, Strategies, and Evidence for Rapid Implementation

Proposal

In the first phase of an emergency, education can protect children and save lives. It can provide a sense of stability, and a chance to regain essential cognitive skills, as well as essential life-saving learning like how to stay safe from unexploded bombs or how to prevent the spread of disease.  Education is consistently identified by children in crisis settings as their greatest need. Despite this, education in emergencies is chronically underfunded - it is often the first thing to go when an emergency hits, and the last to be restored.
To address this challenge, Save the Children (SC), with support from the LEGO Foundation, has established an EiE Rapid Response Fund (RRF). The main objective of the fund is to ensure children’s safety, wellbeing and resilience in the event of an acute humanitarian crisis, via holistic education interventions that include learning through play. At SC, we believe a quality EiE response prioritises wellbeing and safety first, delivers life-saving learning, provides psychosocial support and opportunities to play, ensures that children have the knowledge and skills to protect themselves and cope with the increased risks that are present during emergencies, mitigates additional WASH, health and nutrition barriers, all the while maintaining a connection to and enabling a transition back into more structured learning.
Alongside the establishment of the fund, SC has been working with Wonder Lab to create a new package of resources for rapid onset humanitarian emergencies. We Thrive combines best practices from across sectors and programme approaches to provide staff with updated guidance, tools, and training to implement integrated group activities to support children and adolescents’ protection, learning, and wellbeing in rapid onset crises. The sessions cover life-saving learning; sexual and reproductive health; self-awareness and empowerment; positive social skills; and literacy and numeracy skills. We Thrive is currently being piloted.
This presentation will present findings from some of the initial responses and We Thrive pilots, including in Palestine, Burundi, Lebanon and Somalia. The RRF and We Thrive learning framework measures how children’s safety, wellbeing, and resilience are strengthened in an acute humanitarian crisis. There are four outcomes:
- Access: Children have continuous access to safe and inclusive learning and wellbeing opportunities in the event of an acute humanitarian crisis
- Quality: Children learn through playful approaches that strengthen holistic education, protection and wellbeing outcomes
- Systems Strengthening: Education systems in acute humanitarian crises are increasingly protective and prepared
- Preparedness: SC country offices are better prepared to respond to education in emergencies needs from the onset of a crisis
Finally, teams are exploring how children value and conceptualise play at times of crisis. A mixed-methods approach will be taken to monitoring, evaluation and learning, including child-friendly participatory tools to capture children’s voice. The presentation will discuss what seems to be working well, the relevance and value of integrated, playful EiE responses, ways of working and lesson-learning approaches, as well as some of the challenges related to this type of mechanism and content and the different responses.

Author

• Rachel Smith, Save the Children International