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Advocacy-driven educational programming in emergencies and early reconstruction: A case study - Making safe spaces work for children

Are advocacy-driven initiatives appropriate and effective for the contexts in which they are implemented?

Education has a critical role in contributing to peace and security which is reinforced in the Dakar Framework for Action which outlines the need to “meet the needs of education systems affected by conflict, natural calamities and instability and conduct educational programmes in ways that promote mutual understanding, peace and tolerance, and that help to prevent violence and conflict”

The Dakar World Education Forum in 2000 stressed the importance of meeting ‘the needs of education systems affected by conflict, natural calamities and instability and conduct educational programmes in ways that promote mutual understanding, peace and tolerance, and that help to prevent violence and conflict'.

International NGOs and UN agencies are often responsible for the implementation of field programmes, particularly in acute emergencies, but also during protracted refugee and internally displaced persons operations and in early reconstruction.

Those organisations are motivated by humanitarian concerns to respond to the needs of children and adolescents by providing educational programming of the highest quality, best adapted to those needs. Yet the same agencies are frequently obliged to engage in competition with one another for comparatively scarce funding, in order to be able to continue and expand their advocacy work.

This has led in the past three decades to the growth in humanitarian and development organisations of increasingly professional public relations and media divisions, which exert pressure upon field programme managers to maximise branding and visibility.

The need to deliver quick, highly visible, media-friendly services to humanitarian beneficiaries may as a result distort field programme priorities away from comparatively dull but essential educational service provision towards attractive, gimmicky interventions that try to appeal to broad public interest, sympathy and emotions.

In 2007, millions of children remain out of school, including at least 43 million children in conflict-affected fragile states

Examples of such advocacy driven educational responses include school-feeding programmes, pre-packaged educational kits, and Safe Spaces initiatives which provide educational (and other) activities in a place where children are also protected from harm. Whilst such interventions are designed to protect children and rapidly increase access to education, their implementation may be more a response to an agency’s political and advocacy demands than resulting from a professional analysis of educational needs in conflict-affected communities. Questions have been raised about the extent to which such initiatives are simply “the most convenient way” (ECPAT Int.) of providing educational provision quickly in post-conflict environments, rather than the most appropriate educational provision in particular contexts.

The research will use Safe Spaces initiatives as a case study to examine how agency advocacy or media demands, community voices and other evidence affect programme decision-making, programme implementation and impact. It will explore possible ways forward for interventions that arise in response to advocacy themes and will conclude by formulating recommendations to assist policymakers and practitioners to manage effectively the decision-making process with regard to emergency education programming to ensure that it is in the best interests of quality education.