Uncharted Waters: Climate Crisis, Floods, and Education System Resilience in South Sudan

• In Event: Learning Environments, Well-Being, and Climate Resilience

Proposal

The Nile River, flowing from Uganda in the south to Sudan in the north, bisects South Sudan and has indelibly shaped the country’s history and culture. When considering the advancing climate crisis, however, South Sudan’s most important natural resource is increasingly associated with ever worsening floods that disrupt lives and learning. While data is scarce, 2024 may have been the most devastating year of flooding yet, disrupting access to education by damaging or repurposing school infrastructure, displacing learners and teachers, and interrupting service delivery in already resource-constrained environments (IIEP-UNESCO, 2023; Radio Tamazuj, 2024a).

In recent years, severe and recurrent floods have affected vast areas of the country, including Unity State, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, and the Greater Pibor Administrative Area, displacing hundreds of thousands and rendering schools inaccessible or uninhabitable (Radio Tamazuj, 2024b, OCHA, 2024; UNICEF South Sudan, 2021). ​These local dynamics mirror broader regional patterns. Across East Africa, climate change is amplifying the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. The Horn of Africa, for instance, has faced a prolonged drought (2020–2023) followed by devastating floods in 2023–2024, exacerbating displacement, food insecurity, and humanitarian crises (United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2024; Danish Refugee Council, 2025).

In South Sudan, these environmental shocks interact with structural drivers of fragility - weak governance, limited institutional capacity, and ongoing insecurity - producing a deepening polycrisis (Wagner Tsoni et al., 2024). The Ministry of General Education and Instruction (MoGEI) recently published the country’s first Education Emergency Preparedness Plan (MoGEI, 2025). However, despite efforts to construct flood-resilient infrastructure and establish temporary learning spaces, system-level responses remain fragmented and largely reactive. The compounded impact of seasonal, persistent, and shock flooding calls for more integrated, anticipatory approaches to safeguarding education systems under environmental stress.

This study - for which fieldwork has been conducted during August-September 2025 - responds to that need by investigating how climate-induced flooding affects education access, continuity, and policy coherence in South Sudan. It is framed within the Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crises (ERICC) programme and contributes to the Multi-Country Study 4 (MCS4), which explores education system preparedness in response to diverse shocks across fragile and conflict-affected settings (Datzberger et al., 2025; Kim et al., 2024). Guided by the ERICC conceptual framework - which emphasizes access, quality, continuity, and coherence as core dimensions of education system resilience - this qualitative study draws on interviews, focus groups, and policy analysis to assess both community-level experiences and institutional responses. It seeks to inform the design of more anticipatory, equitable, and climate-adapted education systems, not only in South Sudan, but in similar settings of conflict and protracted crisis.

We examine education system preparedness in South Sudan in the context of floods to examine whether access, continuity, and quality of education are sufficiently robust to the effects of environmental shocks. Through a qualitative case study approach, this study explores preparedness and reactiveness in South Sudan’s education sector holistically by comparing populations affected by three types of floods: seasonal floods in Northern Bahr el Ghazal state, persistent flooding and displacement in Unity state, and flash flooding shocks in Greater Pibor Administrative Area. In doing so, we examine areas with a wide cross-section of lived experiences in terms of ethnolinguistic diversity, exposure to conflict, historical political alignment, and integration to trade and cross-border economies.

In terms of sampling, we draw on semi-structured interviews with local authorities, (I)NGOs, CSOs, and community leaders as well as focus group discussions with adults and youth from affected communities to gather diverse perspectives on the impact of floods on education systems, and what solutions can be applied to ensure these do not exacerbate existing inequalities and sensitivities. This study situates the climate crisis at the heart of education in emergencies discourse to promote locally-driven mitigation and response interventions, with a focus on South Sudan and in particular on the development of education since 2019 within the massive internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Bentiu, Unity state. In doing so, we offer one of the first studies of how different flooding typologies (seasonal, persistent, flash) uniquely shape education system resilience.

Authors

• Nicholas J. Wilson

• Lokiri Moses, OTHERwise Research Ltd

• Ioanna Ayen Wagner Tsoni, OTHERwise Research

• Elifrida Japhet Twalihi

• Thomas Fedlu Hussien, International Rescue Committee

• Simone Datzberger, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society

• Arianna Pacifico, International Rescue Committee

• Oladele Akogun, International Rescue Committee

• Kur Kur Kur, Otherwise Research