IIEP and PEIC celebrate collaboration on crisis-sensitive education

22 November 2016

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H.E. Ambassador Abdulrahman Bin Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, Ambassador of the State of Qatar to Germany, Sue Grant Lewis, Director at IIEP, Leonora Macewen, Programme Specialist at IIEP

After three years of productive collaboration, IIEP and Education Above All’s Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict (PEIC) programme met in Berlin earlier this month to celebrate the accomplishments of their partnership.

Since the project’s launch in 2013, the partners have worked together to develop tools, resources, and methodologies to help ministries of education and their partners mainstream crisis sensitivity in education planning and curricula.

‘Together, we have steered the vision of planning for crisis in the education sector,’ said IIEP Director Suzanne Grant Lewis. ‘We have also strengthened local discussions on how to not only respond to crises, but how to mobilize education systems to prevent and prepare for them.’ 

 

Launch of resource kits

The IIEP-PEIC meeting in Berlin served as an opportunity for the partners to formally launch their in-demand planning and curriculum resource kits. The kits – published in English, French, and Arabic – provide step-by-step guidance on how to address safety, resilience, and social cohesion in education sector planning and curriculum development processes, and are already being used by decision-makers in countries around the world.

Over the course of their collaboration, the partners also held national and regional workshops and distance courses aimed at helping ministries of education to better anticipate crises. Most recently, in October 2016, IIEP and PEIC joined forces with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) to organize an e-Forum on planning for the educational needs of displaced populations.

Working towards supporting ministries

The partnership has also involved providing direct support to ministries of education. In South Sudan, for example, IIEP and PEIC supported the development of the country’s education sector analysis and plan, alongside UNICEF and GIZ, the German development agency. In Uganda, the partners worked with the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology, and Sports and UNICEF to train conflict and disaster risk management (CDRM) ‘champions’. Today, a central-level CDRM Working Group advocates strategies and programmes to reduce conflict and disaster risks, and districts are increasingly including CDRM measures in their five-year District Development Plans.

In addition to publishing case studies on South Sudan and Uganda, the partners have documented the experiences of Nepal, Burkina Faso, and Palestine in publications that serve as a valuable resource for countries looking for concrete examples of how to address conflict and disaster risks through education.

Education4Resilience

IIEP and PEIC continue to share the important outcomes of their partnership through the online repository and website education4resilience.iiep.unesco.org, which hosts more than 400 documents related to education planning and curriculum for safety, resilience, and social cohesion, including complete versions of their planning and curriculum resource kits. At the same time, the partners renew their commitment to crisis-sensitive education through their work with the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) and the Global Education Cluster.