From a cohort to coherence: an iterative approach to understanding ECD coordination in crises

• In Event: Part 2: A systems approach to equity at scale in early childhood development in emergencies: challenges, opportunities, and new directions

Proposal

Bringing together the strands of early childhood development (ECD) programming in the middle of a crisis is a unique challenge. Despite the difficulty, the necessity is clear. Multi-sectoral coordination is essential to the provision of scalable, quality ECD services and it is a prerequisite for increased investment in equitable ECD in humanitarian responses.

Unlike traditional humanitarian sectors - or even other cross cutting issues - ECD does not have a regularized structure for coordination, representation, or integration in the formal humanitarian architecture. This has led to a range of ECD coordination structures and coordinator functions across crises.

In search of more evidence to ground its own coordination and advocacy work, an international organization partnered with an academic institution in 2021 to better understand how those ECD coordination models operate in a variety of crisis contexts. The work began with a series of informal pre-scoping interviews with key stakeholders in the ECDiE community, during which it became clear that there were no existing ECDiE coordination models ready for formal evaluation, but there was tremendous appetite to learn more about where coordination efforts were underway and how these efforts were progressing.

In response to that demand, the partners launched a learning cohort of ECDiE coordinators in October 2021, initially including individuals in coordination functions in Cox’s Bazar Bangladesh, Colombia, and (a combined role for) Jordan and Lebanon. The intent was to generate learnings from their work and share these learnings with key stakeholders, especially humanitarian actors, donors, and host governments potentially interested in deploying ECD coordinators in other crises. The group will expand in late 2022 to include more geographic and context diversity.

To date, the cohort has generated key learnings about identifying and integrating the unique early childhood and parenting needs into formal crisis structures. It has also yielded a particularly interesting example, in Colombia, for coordinating ECD interventions across both a UN-centered and a government-centered set of crisis response mechanisms.

In Colombia, the Inter-sectoral ECD Working Group (within the Education in Emergencies Cluster), serves both the humanitarian response coordination platform for the Venezuelan migration crisis (known as the GIFMM) as well as Colombia’s humanitarian architecture at-large. Sitting at the intersection of these two mechanisms, the working group and its coordinator are uniquely positioned to bring coherence across ECD interventions and geographies.

Ultimately, scaled and equitable ECD in emergencies will require effective coordination between both government and UN- or NGO-led responses, making the Colombia example an essential one for understanding coordination priorities, opportunities, and challenges. This paper will both outline the generalized learnings from the global cohort as well as explore the Colombia example and the lessons learned there to date.

Author

• Carlos del Castillo, Sesame Workshop