Reimagining Education to Keep Children Safe to Learn

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Every child has the right to a safe and secure education. Yet for too many girls and boys around the world, schools are not places of hope, but places of violence and fear. Violence against children in schools encompasses physical, sexual, and emotional violence and affects nearly 250 million children each year. The impact of school violence is significant: it limits children’s participation in learning and academic outcomes, impacts their health, and affects their emotional wellbeing and ability to build healthy relationships. Violence against children in educational settings therefore significantly undermines education investments. At the same time, the education sector has a mandate to keep children safe and offers an entry point to address harmful societal and gender norms that lead to violence in society more broadly. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only interrupted learning and exacerbated inequalities in education access but also put children at increased risk of violence, at home and in distance or online learning spaces, underscoring the importance of this mandate.

The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children has launched the Safe to Learn initiative in order to unite key actors in the education, health, child protection, and violence prevention sectors working toward a shared vision to end violence in and through schools and other educational settings through five pillars of intervention laid out in the Safe to Learn Call to Action: 1) implementing policy and legislation, 2) strengthening prevention and response in and through schools, 3) shifting social norms and behavior, 4) investing resources effectively, and 5) generating and using evidence (https://www.end-violence.org/safetolearn/call). As of October 2020, 15 countries have endorsed the Call to Action: Cambodia, El Salvador, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Jamaica, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Moldova, Nepal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda.

Since the formal introduction of Safe to Learn in January 2019, 14 partners – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the United Nations Girl’s Education Initiative (UNGEI), the Civil Society Forum to End Violence against Children, the World Bank, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the Global Business Coalition for Education, Global Affairs Canada, the World Health Organisation, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, the Office of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children, and the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children – have agreed on a roadmap and committed to collective action in two areas: building political will to end violence against children in and through schools, and collaborating on country-level action to support countries to implement the Call to Action.

To support country-level progress, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children is making strategic investments through the Safe to Learn Fund, and awarded the first round of grants in Nepal and Uganda, with a generous contribution from FCDO. Investments through the Fund are targeting interventions to accelerate implementation of the Call to Action in endorsing countries, aiming to fill country-specific gaps. Programs are based on evidence-based approaches and are working to strengthen or develop school-level systems while employing different strategies to adapt to various scenarios of school closures, improve teachers’ and caregivers’ capacity to create violence-free learning environments, enhance students' empowerment, and increase community engagement. They are doing so through national and local-level advocacy, targeting relevant ministries including the Ministry of Education, local governments, parents, and communities through dialogue and media campaigns and equipping teachers and students with knowledge and skills to recognize and prevent violence against children.

The panel will showcase progress and learnings from the grantees in the two countries. They will present their programs and results, as well as innovative solutions that they have used to adapt to changes in the COVID-19 context, including adaptation of activities and materials for distance learning platforms, working through different media in areas without reliable online access, developing a mobile app for connecting stakeholders remotely, hosting trainings and advocacy meetings virtually, and engaging with relevant government stakeholders and other country-level partners to ensure violence prevention and response is integrated in local distance learning and other COVID-19 adaptation plans, thereby reinforcing global-level policy advocacy. In Nepal, research by Mercy Corps and partners has shown an increase in school drop-outs due to child labor and increased pressures in household chores, psychological stress particularly among girls, and an alarming lack of access to support. In response, the Blossom Project is delivering content through radio programs, engaging teachers and youth champions as mentors, and piloting a community accountability and response mechanism. World Education has conducted quantitative and qualitative research around prevalence of different types of violence and intersection with gender, caste, minority language, (dis)ability, ethnicity, and religion, and is implementing a school-based program to address these. VSO is working with local governments, communities, parents, and children to strengthen school-based response systems. In Uganda, Raising Voices is testing a model where schools are supported through Regional Resource Persons and Violence Against Children Prevention Centers and stakeholders are connected through a remote Peer Learning Network, and Right to Play is using play to engage, teach and empower children to contribute towards their own safer school environments, and prevent and respond to violence. The panel will feature opening remarks from the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children and short presentations from Mercy Corps, Raising Voices, Right to Play, Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO), and World Education.

COVID-19 has disrupted learning for nearly all children with almost 1.5 billion children being out of school at some point during 2020. COVID-19 has also raised awareness of violence against children, and the important role that schools play for children's health, well-being and safety, beyond the educational benefits. As COVID-19 prompts educationalists to reimagine some aspects of learning, there is an opportunity for the education sector to build back better and ensure that children everywhere have access to safe learning environments. The programs presented here are making an important contribution towards that goal.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Kristen Hansen, Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children

Individual Presentations

• Safeguarding Education of children during COVID-19: Lessons from Nepal - Jenisha Twanabasu, Mercy Corps; Nabin Lamichhane, Mercy Corps Nepal

• Breaking the culture of silence through a Complaint Response Mechanism (CRM) to ensure a safe learning environment in school - Ananda Paudel, Volunteer Service Overseas; Sushil Khanal, Volunteer Service Overseas

• Creating a Safer Learning Environment in Nepal’s Schools - Jyoti Rana Magar, World Education; Padma Gurung, World Education; Helen Bernadette Sherpa, World Education, Inc.

• Scaling up the Good Schools Toolkit in Uganda - Hassan Mulusi, Raising Voices

• Safe to Play: Improving safety for children in Ugandan schools through play-based learning approaches - Evelyn Naguti, Right to Play