Even in Chaos: Education in Times of Emergency

By Francis J. Gavin

Children have a fundamental right to education, and to the protection that schools uniquely provide in the chaos that characterizes life for refugees and internally displaced persons. This book is grounded in the personal experiences of children, aid workers, and national leaders involved in post-conflict resolution. Experts from many troubled parts of the world consider the scope of the problem, as well as the tools needed to address the crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780823260676

Book preview

PART I VOICES

Every social movement begins with—and is sustained by—the passionate voices of those who see wrongs and want to right them. Agencies and organizations such as UNICEF, UNESCO, and Save the Children have been in the forefront of the global alliance that is promoting the right of children to education in emergencies. In this opening section, I invited some of the leaders in this international movement to offer their views; here are the voices of children and a psychiatrist, a Sheikha and a President, as well as the personal reflections of a humanitarian worker and a United Nations official.

My only regret is that the reader cannot hear, as I have, the sounds of these voices, because only with the spoken word can one fully appreciate the depth of their commitment and wisdom.

1 Ensuring the Right to Education

H.H. SHEIKHA MOZAH BINT NASSER AL MISSNED

In recent years, there has been a determined and almost diabolical process to undermine the right to education. The past decade was marked by a growing awareness of the importance of education, in particular following the World Education Forum’s adoption in 2000 of the Dakar Framework for Action—Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments and the emphasis on education in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, the same period has also witnessed continuing attacks on students, educators, and indeed entire educational infrastructures. Almost daily, we hear reports of deliberate attacks on universities and professors in Iraq, on schools and teachers in Afghanistan. Recently, the world witnessed the attacks on schools and universities in Gaza. In fact, the International Save the Children Alliance estimates that some 40 million of the 75 million children around the world who are not receiving primary education live in fragile, conflict-affected states.

Although the purpose of the MDGs is clear, it is obvious that the international community is not taking them as seriously as it should. We cannot help but be perturbed when we observe the discrepancies between agreed upon international laws and conventions and violent attacks on education in conflict zones. There can be no greater example of this incongruity than the onslaught in Gaza, with its deliberate and direct targeting of educational institutions.

Has education really been reduced to a political commodity? Is it merely a tool used by politicians to manufacture the consent of loyal supporters or to deprive societies of progress? We are concerned that through the targeting of centers of learning, entire societies are deliberately being denied of their right to progress. We must not let education be used as a political commodity, an instrument placed in the hands of power brokers. And we must undertake measures to defend the right to education and protect against any interruption in its delivery, including and most especially, during times of conflict.

We are concerned by the fact that children and families are being psychologically scarred and traumatized when the one place they thought of as a zone of peace—their school—becomes a target of war. We are concerned that if firm action is not taken to insulate education from conflict, depressed and desperate youth will find themselves plunged further and further into a cycle of violence. For if children are not in school, they are surely receiving their education elsewhere.

Therefore, it is with a sense of urgency that the world community must act and identify ways to ensure compliance with international law, safeguard against attacks on education facilities, and put an end to impunity of those who attack education, including teachers and students.

Every child has the right to education. This right is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other man-made treaties. It is now time to talk straight and ensure that these rights are upheld.

2 Protecting Human Rights in Emergency Situations

VERNOR MUÑOZ

Introduction

Some sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights¹ (UDHR), the commitment to realizing the human right to education has been a signal failure. It has seen the goals of Education for All² and the educational targets of the Millennium Development Goals³ continually subsumed to the logic of economics, which in turn sees education as nothing more than an instrument of the market. We are all affected to a certain extent by this failure. For some, however, the consequence is a complete denial of that right.

For much of my mandate as UN Special Rapporteur on Education,⁴ I have paid particular attention to groups of persons traditionally marginalized and particularly vulnerable to exclusion from education. In so doing, I have attempted to establish the causes and circumstances surrounding their exclusion and the challenges that must be faced in order to promote the realization of their right to education. It has become clear from this that there remains an urgent need to redouble efforts to safeguard the right to education for those people—especially children, adolescents, and youths—who are denied any possibility of attending school or attaining an education as the result, direct or indirect, of an emergency situation affecting their community.

For the purposes of this chapter, emergency refers to any crisis situation arising from natural causes (such as an earthquake, tsunami, flood, or hurricane), or to armed conflict, which may be international (including military occupation) or internal (as defined in international humanitarian law), or post-conflict situations that impair, interrupt, delay, deny, or impede the right to education. Such situations put people’s health and lives at risk and threaten or destroy public and private assets, limiting the capacity and resources to guarantee human rights and uphold social responsibilities. Recurrent and/or combined emergencies in impoverished regions may of course have a multiplier effect, with devastating consequences for school infrastructure, teaching, and the educational opportunities generally of the children living in those regions.

Emergency situations are becoming increasingly frequent the world over.⁵ However, the impact on each person directly involved in an emergency, while invariably brutal, may also vary, as will his or her personal reaction. At no time should such situations entail suspension of domestic and international obligations to guarantee the human rights of all those affected. State institutions, the international community, organizations, and individuals that offer assistance when they arise should be guided by those rights, rather than responding on the basis of often unwarranted and incorrect assumptions or financial risk. Further, for those that do offer assistance, they should act with those affected rather than for them.

Article 26 of the UDHR acknowledges that everyone has the right to education, which should be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and further promote understanding, tolerance and friendship. Yet we would do well to heed history and recognize that education can be of a kind that does not build peace but increases social and gender inequalities and may well fuel conflict.

Finally, there is a disjunction between social, cultural, and economic structures and educational activities carried out in times of emergency. There is an urgent need to close this gap because, although the impact of every emergency is different, there is one prevailing characteristic common to all: the interruption, degradation, or destruction of education and educational systems.⁶

Education in Emergencies

There is a multiplicity of proposed definitions and conceptions of emergency and the stages or time frames they reflect. The focus here will be on the period from early response to an emergency to the initial stages of reconstruction, for this is when what are perhaps the worst violations of the right to education occur.⁷ It is during this period that educational systems and opportunities are destroyed and that the limited attention paid by the humanitarian agencies involved, and the relative absence of clear programmatic principles, indicators, or funding, are most clearly revealed.

The role and content of education in emergency situations are also a source of conceptual disagreement, especially where a distinction is being made between education in emergencies and education in non-emergency situations.

Context

The consequences of brutal armed conflicts and of natural disasters for education have become increasingly visible. Either can strike in any region, often without warning. No State is exempt; all have differing forms and levels of resources upon which they can draw to deal—or otherwise—with the consequences. In all of them, the civilian population is the chief casualty.

Statistics on conflict-related emergencies remain disturbingly vague, as most are based on estimates, which vary dramatically. In 2003 UNICEF stated that 121 million children were affected by armed conflict,⁸ yet in 2000 UNESCO had put the figure at 104 million.⁹ A comprehensive review in 2004¹⁰ estimated the number of children and adolescents affected by armed conflict and without access to formal education to be at least 27 million, most being internally displaced persons (90 percent). More generally, approximately half of children who receive no education live in States where there is or recently has been armed conflict and where, in some States, net school enrollment is below 50 percent.¹¹

The number of refugee and displaced children receiving no education outside UNHCR camps remains unknown, as does the number of illiterate young people, adolescents, and adults who have no educational opportunities.

Even though natural disasters are statistically less lethal than conflicts, causing one-third the number of deaths, in the 1990s natural disasters affected seven times the number of people affected by conflict.¹² Notably, natural disasters are on the rise, having occurred three times as often in the 1990s as they did in the 1950s. There are no reliable data permitting a comparison of the impact of natural disasters and the impact of armed conflict. There are reliable data, however, showing that around 90 percent of those affected by natural disasters live in States with limited capacity to cope with that impact.¹³

Statistics in themselves are not always sufficient in showing the degradation and destruction of education systems when an emergency arises, particularly in the case of armed conflict where teachers, students, and parents become the targets of violence. Parents keep their children at home to avoid the risks involved in the trip to and from school and to avoid falling victim to landmines.

The killing of students and teachers and the bombing and destruction of schools have escalated sharply over the past four years in terms of victims and brutality,¹⁴ and in certain states, Afghanistan being a notable example, there is a clear gender dimension. Such attacks are directed against girls’ schools, the sole intent being to intimidate and prevent girls from accessing education.¹⁵

Emergencies severely affect people with disabilities in particular. In her now well-known report Impact of Armed Conflict on Children,¹⁶ Graça Machel noted that, for every child killed, three children are seriously injured or permanently disabled. More specifically, she found that armed conflict and political violence are the leading causes of injury and physical disability, and they are primarily responsible for the desperate conditions of more than four million children who currently live with disabilities and for the lack of basic services and/or minimum support.

The Importance of Education in Emergencies

Although I am personally opposed to the current tendency to treat education as no more than a tool, I recognize that, beyond the human rights imperative, education also provides physical, psychosocial, and cognitive protection that can be both lifesaving and life-sustaining. Education offers safe spaces for learning, as well as the ability to identify and provide support for affected individuals, particularly children and adolescents.

Education can also directly save lives by protecting against exploitation and harm, including abduction, recruitment of children into armed groups, and sexual and gender-based violence. In addition, it provides the knowledge and skills to survive in a crisis through, for example, the dissemination of lifesaving information about landmine and cluster bomb safety, HIV/AIDS prevention, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and peace building.¹⁷

Humanitarian aid traditionally focuses on the three classic areas of food, health, and shelter. Assistance, however, should be geared to people’s overall needs and welfare, which, as noted before, clearly implicates education.

International Legal and Political Framework

The international legal and political framework of education in emergencies is the product of several global developments: the ever-increasing number of natural disasters, the changing nature of conflict and the fight against terrorism, and an unwavering perception of what education should be and the quality and kinds of education that should be available.

As parties to human-rights treaties, States have an obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to education, whether or not an emergency situation prevails. In addition, the right to education inheres in each person regardless of legal status, whether refugee, child soldier, or internally displaced.

Legal Framework

The UDHR establishes, in article 26, the right to free compulsory elementary education. Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights¹⁸ defines the scope of this right more precisely, requiring that education should be available to all who have not received or completed primary education.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) obliges States to ensure, without discrimination of any kind, access to education for all children living in their territories.¹⁹ Its Article 28 promotes free compulsory primary education, urges States to develop accessible secondary education and other forms of education, and encourages international cooperation in educational matters.

Special attention must also be paid to the real aims of education, which are interpreted by the CRC as transcending mere access to formal schooling and embracing a broad range of life experiences and learning processes that enable children, individually and collectively, to develop their personalities, talents, and abilities and live a full and satisfying life within society.²⁰

Moreover, under Article 22, States are obliged to ensure that a child who is seeking refugee status receives appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance and enjoys all rights as set forth in the CRC. Of particular importance is Article 38, which calls on States to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict²¹ has the potential to reduce the number of children recruited into regular armies and irregular armed groups and mitigate the implications for their educational opportunities.²²

The accountability mechanisms of the CRC²³ remain weak, for they provide for no more than State party reports. Nonetheless, the CRC has shown a special interest in and commitment to, the issue of education in emergencies, as reflected in its guidelines for submission of reports, its recommendations, and its 2008 Day of General Discussion on education in emergencies.²⁴

The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees²⁵ provides that refugee children should be accorded the same treatment as is accorded to nationals with respect to elementary education (Art. 22, para. 1) and treatment no less favorable than that accorded to foreigners with respect to education other than elementary education. UNHCR found it necessary, however, to gear much of its work toward the protection of displaced persons, despite the lack of specific mandate within its statute for such work.²⁶ The growing number of displaced persons and the lack of specific legal protection prompted the development of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement,²⁷ on the basis of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

International humanitarian law establishes a regulatory framework protecting the right to education during armed conflicts. The Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War²⁸ states that measures should be taken to ensure that children who are orphaned or separated from their families as a result of a war have access to education.²⁹

The 1977 Additional Protocol II³⁰ to the Geneva Conventions, applying as it does to non-international conflicts, is of the utmost relevance today as it covers the actions of non-State armed groups.

Of particular importance is Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,³¹ which states that all intentional attacks on buildings dedicated to education constitute war crimes and are therefore subject to the Court’s jurisdiction.³²

International Political Responsibilities

The recognition given in Articles 4 and 28 of the CRC to the need for international cooperation in order to implement the right to education has not been translated fully and clearly into political responsibilities for the international community.

Nonetheless, the goal of education for all set up by the World Conference on Education for All,³³ held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, certainly moved the language of human-rights obligations toward a future responsibility concerning the establishment of minimum standards in basic education. The Dakar Framework for Action on Education For All³⁴ was adopted at the World Education Forum,³⁵ held in 2000. The World Forum paid greater, albeit still insufficient, attention to the educational consequences of emergencies, placing special emphasis on children affected by conflict, natural disasters, and instability.

In contrast to political moves preceding them, the Millennium Development Goals³⁶ do not use the language of rights and State obligations. Instead, they assign educational goals to a development rather than a rights agenda. The effect has been to narrow the view of education to that of a quantifiable access to a full primary education that is free, compulsory and of good quality by the year 2015 (Goal 2) and the promotion of gender parity by the year 2005 (Goal 3).

In emergency situations, the obligation remains on States to ensure the right to education, even though they might lack the requisite will and/or capacity to do so. In recognition of this, a variety of actors— international NGOs, national and international agencies, and some donors—have attempted to shoulder this responsibility in part. Of these perhaps and more specifically, the Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies, Chronic Crises and Early Reconstruction (INEE Minimum Standards)³⁷ developed by the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)³⁸ stand out. These were drafted as a direct response to the neglect of education within humanitarian aid efforts.

The INEE Minimum Standards offer a harmonized framework of principles and paths of action to all actors who may be involved in the provision of education during emergencies, for them to coordinate their educational activities and, even more importantly, to promote the acceptance of responsibilities.

Despite the growing awareness of the need for delivery of education in emergencies and the progress made in doing so, there still remains an enormous gap between the legal and political responsibilities of the international community and its action and funding priorities.

Donors’ Action and Priorities

Priorities for Action

UNICEF and UNESCO, the UN agencies that have assumed leadership for education in emergencies, are formally committed to the right to education. However, this commitment is not always matched by the educational strategies of large sectors of the international community, including other UN agencies, intergovernmental organizations, development banks, and private-sector and civil-society agencies.³⁹

Although some progress has been achieved, especially with the creation of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Education Cluster, education as a priority in humanitarian assistance will continue to remain beyond reach until this priority is recognized by all, including, primarily, governments.

Donors

Humanitarian assistance is underfunded, barely receiving two-thirds of the sums identified as being needed and formally requested.⁴⁰ Consequently, when priorities are set, education in emergencies is not high on the list. In 2004, for example, only approximately 1.5 percent of the total humanitarian commitments were earmarked for educational programs.⁴¹

There is a steady increase in the literature covering the challenges relating to the financing of education in emergencies, a selection of which are highlighted herein. These clearly implicate the need for monitoring, evaluation, dialogue, and dissemination of best practices and innovations.

The challenges relating to education in emergencies most frequently discussed include the following:

• There is a lack of sufficient and suitable funding for education in general and the failure to honor formal commitments, despite the adoption of policies and the support of many donors who promote Education for All and the MDGs.

• There is a dominant paradigm of aid, based on the widely held premise that assistance is most effective in States with stronger policies and institutional adjustments.⁴² Despite bilateral donors’ emphasis on the importance of assisting the countries with the most pressing needs, such States—also referred to as emergency-affected fragile States—receive approximately 43 percent less funding than they would need based on the size of their population, their degree of poverty, and their level of political and institutional development.

• Donors are reluctant to consider education as part of aid and humanitarian response, despite the fact that emergency situations can, and often do, last for many years.

• The priorities of donors have moved from the financing of long-term development needs to concentrating instead on humanitarian disaster relief. This frequently leads, as previously noted, to a focus on activities in the traditional fields of food, health and shelter.⁴³

• There is a lack of continuity in funding between the onset of an emergency and reconstruction (often divided into humanitarian phases and development phases).

• We have limited evidence concerning the effectiveness and responsibility of the providers of education in emergencies.

The limited involvement of donors in the implementation of the right to education has hampered coordination, the development of partnerships, examination of alternative funding models, and the building of risk-management capabilities.

Education Providers in Situations of Emergency

There is no single agency to which States requiring educational assistance can turn in an emergency. Neither is there a single funding mechanism for channeling financial resources. On the contrary, a plethora of actors take the stage, each with its own expertise, agenda and distinct priorities, mandates, capacities, spheres of influence, field presence, and financial bases. They include both agencies and other bodies of the UN system, bilateral and multilateral donors, international and domestic NGOs, and affected communities.

Education in emergencies enjoys a high level of awareness within the UN.

UNESCO has as its mandate to contribute to peace, security, and development through education and intellectual cooperation. A major effort that it has deployed since its foundation has been to ensure the right to education of persons affected by armed conflicts, through advocacy for a comprehensive understanding in the interests of peace. Although it has a wide-ranging mandate, UNESCO is painfully short of funds and other resources.

In general, the interventions of the agencies of the UN system are characterized by their concentration on primary education and by a concomitant lack of attention paid to tertiary education, particularly in fragile States.

If the agencies of the UN are to fulfill their mandates more completely, they will need to be adequately financed by the Member States. They will also need to revitalize their coordination efforts and raise the profile of the place occupied by education as a right in emergency situations.

Finally, although the World Bank has made important contributions to education in emergencies, it continues to work outside the human-rights framework. This reflects its strategy on education, which is to concentrate on support to education in the reconstruction stages following emergencies.

The Inter-agency Standing Committee’s Education Cluster

The recent creation of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Education Cluster⁴⁴ is welcome, constituting as it does a first step toward the inclusion of education as a priority component of the humanitarian response.

The Education Cluster must act to meet the need to ensure a greater responsibility in that response on the part of the international community, including the UN, donor agencies and States, and local and international NGOs. It should become the proper mechanism for determining the educational needs in emergency situations and responding to them in a coordinated manner, for which purpose it should use and develop the tools laid down by the INEE.

Affected Populations

Refugees and Returnees

The educational options for this population are determined to a large degree by the repatriation efforts led by UNHCR. The aim of bringing about successful repatriation and reintegration of returnees, both teachers and students, has led to an emphasis in the study plans on all those aspects that recall the country of origin. This approach is not, however, always possible, as the relevant teaching material is often unobtainable or unsuitable. Such materials may be, for example, a version of the curriculum as it existed before the conflict, one that may even have contributed to the conflict itself, or it may be a mixture of the local model of the study plan plus innovations made to it by an NGO.

Internally Displaced People

Internally displaced people are disproportionately denied their right to education, with estimates standing at approximately 90 percent. This may be due to a number or a combination of reasons: ongoing lack of security, the lack of an international agency specifically mandated to respond to their needs, the lack of physical access for education providers, the lack of political will in governments to allow education providers to offer such people real opportunities, or the simple reluctance of governments to commit generally to fulfillment of the right.

Women and Girls

Gender parity in education is the focus of a global educational strategy that is obviously inadequate. In the context of emergencies, the relevant literature tends to concentrate on challenges other than parity: those created by the greater vulnerability of women and girls, including their problems of security, hygiene, and the lack of adequate sanitary facilities within the educational institutions, as well as the shortage of female teachers and the fact that girls are also required to do housework.

The impact of emergencies on girls is more serious, given that historically they have been the victims of exploitation and emotional and physical aggression, especially sexual aggression. For this reason, it is of fundamental importance for early response to emergencies to develop appropriate curricula that can be adapted to their particular needs and rights.

Child Soldiers and Combatants

It is estimated that around 250,000 boys and girls worldwide have been recruited to serve not only as soldiers, but also in the detection of mines, or as spies, messengers, and members of suicide missions.⁴⁵ A large proportion of international attention has been focused on their demobilization and reintegration, in line with international disarmament principles and the reintegration and demobilization standards laid down in the CRC.

A rights-based approach is needed to ensure that all educational programs deal with the multiple discrimination experienced by child soldiers, discrimination directed, among others, toward adolescents, minorities, and those with disabilities.

Formal and informal education, vocational training, and social-capacity building in general have been identified by many former child soldiers or combatants as essential to their long-term well-being,⁴⁶ and their prioritization should be a guiding principle for assistance offered.

People with Disabilities

People with disabilities, of either sex and of all ages, and in most parts of the world, suffer from a pervasive and disproportionate denial of their right to education.⁴⁷ In emergencies, however, particularly during conflicts and the post-conflict period, their right to receive special support and care is not always recognized by communities or States.

Young People and Adolescents

Governments and the international community have traditionally disregarded the education of young people and adolescents, since priority is always given to primary education.

However, there are an increasing number of experiments in accessible, realistic, relevant, and flexible learning, promoted primarily by international NGOs that offer youngsters an alternative basic education. These initiatives have largely been ignored by governments and donors, possibly owing to their lack of emphasis on standardization.

Consultations with Children

My various consultations with children and adolescents who have lived through conflict situations point to certain similarities in educational experiences and hopes. It is evident, for example, that conflict has a serious impact on their enjoyment of the right to an education that is free of charge, compulsory, relevant, and of good quality, especially for the children still living in the affected areas.

As many of the children and adolescents indicated, access to education and whether or not children remain in school depends to a large extent on the cost of education to them, including uniforms, teaching materials, food, and travel. They also voiced concerns regarding the extremely poor state of the school infrastructure, and some indicated that they had to walk long distances to reach school and in so doing were afraid of attack by armed groups.

Curriculum, Quality, and Shared Learning

The objectives of Education for All set out in the Dakar Framework for Action clearly state that access to a quality education is a basic human right of the victims of conflicts and natural disasters.

The quality of education implies a collective responsibility that includes respect for the individual nature of all persons; and it implies respect for and empowerment of diversity, since any learning demands the recognition of the other as a legitimate being.

The transition from emergency intervention to large-scale reconstruction provides unique opportunities for curriculum design and for improving the quality of learning. This requires generating data and minimum standards and proposes introducing innovative, flexible, and dynamic assessment systems.⁴⁸ The development of the curriculum and the wide spectrum of teaching activities that this includes require democratic and participatory attitudes in teachers and students alike.

In conflict and post-conflict situations, the new curriculum development that is required must be based on a detailed analysis and an understanding of any role played by the previous education system in, such that the emergency itself may turn into an opportunity for qualitative change.

An urgent task for governments has to be education for peaceful coexistence. Education for peace shares the same objective as human rights and should involve education as a whole, rather than as isolated components of the curriculum. It should make possible the understanding by all learners of the causes and consequences of emergencies.

Recommendations

The following measures should be taken so as to guarantee the immediate priority of this right:

• Greater emphasis must be placed on guaranteeing the right to education during emergency situations, in contrast to the current focus on postconflict situations.

• Increased action must be taken to bring to end the impunity for persons and armed groups, including regular armies, that attack schools, students, and teachers.

• There is need for further research into the effectiveness of some of the measures prompted by the increase in violence against schools, teachers, and students, such as armed responses in defense of communities and the promotion of resistance.

• Although there is an increased interest in the allocation and effectiveness of assistance in emergency situations, greater attention should be paid to assigning more resources specifically to fragile States.

• Prompt attention should be paid to the consequences of emergency situations for girls and female adolescents, and strategic measures developed to give physical and emotional protection in order to ensure their attendance at school.

• Increased and more thorough research is needed into specific programs for young people and adolescents, including the particular needs of persons with disabilities.

• Greater attention to understanding and the development of education for peace is required.

• There should be a shift away from the current emphasis on quantifiable, but often inaccurate, figures on, for example, school enrollment and dropout rates, and greater use of qualitative methodologies that will make it possible to determine the degree of psychosocial care required during emergencies.

Recommendations to States

• Develop a plan that prepares for education in emergencies, as part of their general educational programs, to include specific measures for continuity of education at all levels and during all the phases of the emergency. Such a plan should include training for the teachers in various aspects of emergency situations.

• Draw up a program of studies that is adaptable, nondiscriminatory, gender-sensitive, and of high quality, and that meets children’s and young people’s needs during emergency situations.

• Ensure the involvement of children, parents, and civil society in planning school activities, so that safe spaces are provided for students throughout the emergency.

• Design and implement specific plans to avoid exploitation of girls and young women in the wake of emergencies.

Recommendations to Donors

• Include education in all their humanitarian assistance plans and increase the education allocation to at least 4.2 percent of total humanitarian assistance, in line with need.⁴⁹

• Actively support the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Education Cluster.

• Use the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies Minimum Standards as a basis for the educational activities that are part of humanitarian response.

Recommendations to Intergovernmental and Non-Governmental Organizations

• Guarantee that educational responses to emergencies are in line with the INEE Minimum Standards.

• Seek mechanisms to ensure greater and more effective NGO involvement in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, with a view to improving the coordination of the humanitarian response in the area of education.

• Organize and coordinate efforts for the effective implementation of quality programs of inclusive education during the emergency response.

3 The Child Protection Viewpoint

ALEC WARGO

Although the subject of this book is substantially wider, I will limit myself to personal, field-based perspectives on the often fraught relationship between education¹ and child protection in armed conflict. I hope that this personal perspective, garnered from years working in the protection field, will remove us from the world of guidelines and policies and return us to the flesh-and-bone realities around the globe, where students, their teachers, and their communities often find themselves in the midst of armed conflict.

When Education Protects

At the start of my career in child protection, with UNHCR in Central Africa, I was only theoretically aware of the role of education in protecting children from harm and abuse during conflict and post-conflict situations, and that education personnel could serve as a linchpin in a community’s ability to protect its children.² Perhaps I still held a somewhat jaded American view of education as sets of buildings with teachers who tried to fill our heads with bits of information in order to pass a series of exams that would place us in later life into a particular skill or field. Sometimes school challenged us, often it bored