What are the principal donors’ current engagement policies and practices in partnering with national Ministries of Education and non-state providers of education in fragile states to fund education during and after conflicts, and how effective are they in assisting these countries to achieve the education Millennium Development Goals?
Researchers, policy-makers and practitioners around the world increasingly acknowledge the critical and necessary role of education in emergencies. The fifth of the eleven objectives adopted by the Dakar World Education Forum explicitly focuses on the rights of children in emergencies highlighting education as a key right. This has led several major donors to recognise the importance of education provision in situations of difficulty in their policies and frameworks and show an interest in engaging in education during and after 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'. |
However, despite the rhetoric, it seems that education is neither a priority in humanitarian nor in development aid with conflict-affected fragile states remaining underfunded and marginalised in terms of the amounts of both overall and educational aid they receive. This lack of engagement and funding limits progress towards achieving the education Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and if these low levels of engagement continue, every child will not have access to quality schooling by 2015 thus threatening the realisation of the Education for All (EFA) agenda which is already uncertain in nearly all conflict- affected countries.
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There are a plethora of reasons why donors are not engaging deeply in countries affected by conflict. Many of them are well documented in the literature and the key ones include governance concerns (corruption, fiduciary risk, human rights violations); administrative and security difficulties of managing in-country programmes; low absorption capacity of ministries of education and finance; competing demands from other sectors of the economy; lack of coherence between the ‘humanitarian’ response and the longer-term ‘developmental’ response; incoherence of donor priorities and national priorities; lack of predictability of aid funding; and the bias of donors towards supporting ‘good performers’. Whilst there are risks associated with investing in countries affected by conflict, it is possible and critical for donors to do so if the MDGs are to be attained.
In 2007, millions of children remain out of school, including at least 43 million children in conflict-affected fragile states
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The research will conclude by offering recommendations primarily to donors on how they can engage more deeply to ensure that the education MDGs are met in fragile states. In addition, recommendations will be made for Ministries of Education and non-state providers about how they can strengthen their role to enable donors to engage more deeply.
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