Mark Richmond, chief of educational services co-ordination for the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. Former head of UNESCO’s Programme for Education for Emergencies and Reconstruction in Nairobi.
Schoolchildren in Kibondo, a resettlement village in the Kigali region (Rwanda). Some 230,000 Rwandan children do not have places in school.
Education symbolizes a commitment to the future, something more valuable than ever in the aftermath of violent conflict
Wooden boards carved with Koranic verses are the only teaching materials available in Bardera camp for refugees and displaced persons (Somalia).
The scene in Neprostino camp near Skopje (Macedonia) on April 15 1999, the third day at school for some 500 children who had fled from Kosovo.
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Emergency education: the lessons and challenges of Kosovo The Kosovo crisis will be a major source of experience and reflection regarding
emergency education. The refugee situation in Albania and Macedonia witnessed the
application of many lessons and practices derived from other emergencies: for example,
the inclusion of education within the early stages of refugee assistance operations,
the attempt to provide demarcated spaces within camps for recreational and educational
activities, the priority focus on primary schooling, the provision of educational
kits, the attention given to psycho-social needs, the explicit adoption of a phased
approach, and the use of refugee teachers in the camps (see article). |
From ‘school-in-a-box’
packages to counselling for children traumatized by fear and bereavement, education
is playing a pivotal role in emergency relief operations
When people
are robbed of their homes, land and possessions by violent conflict, time and time
again they ask for education. Over the past decade, from Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda
to Bosnia and Kosovo, the United Nations has been confronted in all-too-close succession
by what are commonly referred to as complex political emergencies. These crises involving
violent internal conflicts based on nationalist, local, ethnic and religious factors,
lead to huge internal and external population displacements, the looting and destruction
of infrastructure, the targeting of civilian populations and the collapse of essential
basic services. Their spread, particularly in Africa, owes much to the breakdown
of the post-colonial settlements of the 1950s and 1960s held in place somewhat artificially
by superpower rivalries during the Cold War and associated ideological and geopolitical
alignments.
Warlords
and bandits
At the root of many
such emergencies are escalating economic problems that have stimulated fierce inter-group
struggles over access to and control over resources. In some cases, such as Somalia,
violent internal conflicts have led to the collapse of the state, leaving ordinary
citizens at the mercy of warlords and bandits.
Assuring survival is of course the first task of any humanitarian operation. This
means providing basic services such as food, water, security, health care and shelter.
But along with this, there is a steadily growing recognition of the need to introduce
education in the early stages of humanitarian assistance, whether it be for refugees,
internally displaced persons or war-affected populations. This notion, of relatively
recent origin, draws upon several justifications. One is the right to education itself,
a right which is not forfeited because of war or displacement. This right is enshrined
in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and was at the heart of the Jomtien
Conference (1990) on Education for All. These developments have helped to generate
an international policy context conducive to the recognition not only of everyone’s
right to education but also of the obligation of all social actors–agencies, donors
and NGOs–to translate that right into practice.
At a practical level, educators and psychologists emphasize the importance for children’s
development of minimizing the period during which learning is disrupted. Organized
recreational and educational activities bring routine back into children’s lives
and help them to maintain a connection to their own socio-cultural environment. Whether
formal or non-formal, schooling can re-establish a sense of normalcy in an abnormal
situation, and offer alienated youth an alternative to militias, crime, delinquency
or drugs. In emergency situations, schools can be one of the most valuable channels
for communicating messages about the environment, nutrition, mine awareness, cholera
and Aids prevention. They are also places where themes such as human rights, peace
and reconciliation can be broached. Such values constitute the underpinning of any
subsequent programme of national reconstruction. Moreover, schools can often serve
as centres for relief and rehabilitation programmes for the community at large. Education
can offer opportunities for paid employment and provide adults with a chance to play
a role in their new, albeit temporary, surroundings. Last but not least, education
symbolizes a commitment to the future, something more valuable than ever in the aftermath
of violent conflict.
While each crisis calls for a specific type of rapid educational response, the tragedies
of the past decade have given international agencies sufficient experience to draw
up guidelines for conducting operations. Because it is impossible to get a schooling
system into gear overnight, a phased approach enabling education to be introduced
in the early stages of humanitarian assistance has become standard practice in emergency
situations.
After the collection of relevant educational data (number of children, availability
of teachers, etc.), a first phase brings children together for recreation activities–games,
songs, listening to stories, and perhaps some simple lessons. During a second phase,
non-formal schooling is established on a systematic basis, often using a Teacher
Emergency Package (TEP), which was first conceived by UNESCO for use in Somalia and has now been
translated into several languages and culturally adapted to suit different populations.
Although the concept is evolving, this “school-in-a-box” or “mobile classroom” is
designed for approximately 80 refugee children of primary school age and aims to
teach functional literacy and numeracy, rather than a formal graded curriculum with
exams. A box typically includes slates, chalk, exercise books and pencils for students
and a teacher’s bag containing cloth charts (alphabet, number and multiplication),
a guide outlining teaching methods, an attendance book and scrabble sets of small
wooden blocks so that teachers can create language and number games. Designed for
a six-month learning span, TEPs act as a bridge between no schooling at all and a
return to some form of regular schooling.
After this interim period, the third phase of near-normal schooling generally begins,
based on curricula and textbooks (when available) from the country of origin. Another
important aspect of emergency education programmes is the training of teachers to
recognize symptoms of trauma in children who all too often arrive in their new makeshift
schools after witnessing appalling levels of horror and violence. Psycho-social support
programmes include counselling to help children come to terms with loss, bereavement,
displacement and fear.
This entire strategy is geared towards education for repatriation. The concept, first
clearly articulated during the experience of providing schooling to Mozambican refugees
in Malawi in the 1980s, has gained growing acceptance in the 1990s, partly because
host countries, which are generally too poor to absorb a large foreign influx, need
to be reassured that refugees will not settle there on a permanent basis. Hence the
importance of using the mother tongue as the language of instruction, of teaching
the curriculum of the country of origin (provided it has not been a source of oppression
to the displaced population), and relying largely or wholly upon refugee teachers
to staff the schools.
The notion that education is geared towards repatriation adds a long-term dimension
to the concept of emergency. It implies that planners think along a relief-to-development
continuum that fits in with the development policy being designed for a country or
sub-region. Unfortunately, this is not a linear process: countries such as Angola
and Sudan have slipped in and out of war over recent decades, hampering efforts at
national reconstruction.
Community
initiatives
Broadly speaking, emergencies
can be conceived as opportunities for educational transformation. This is why the
planning of emergency education, especially when the task of rebuilding educational
systems begins, must integrate an approach that combines top-down technical planning,
which tends to characterize most postwar systems, with bottom-up community-oriented
development initiatives. In emergency situations, parents, elders and professionals
often play an important role in the setting-up and running of schools, often developing
a sense of ownership towards them.
They should continue to have a voice in the planning of education after resettling
in their country of origin. But traditional avenues through which financial support
is channelled for reconstruction tend to exclude civil society. Donors go through
the central state–often a highly weakened state with poor administrative and management
capacity–to deliver funds, a method that tends to undermine more participatory approaches
to educational planning. The international community also needs to take stock of
recent interventions and assess them in more thorough and critical ways. The turnover
of crises in the past decade has been such that sufficient time has not been devoted
to actually learning from the past. Rather than jump onto the next emergency, key
practitioners involved in large-scale operations should be given the opportunity
to take stock so that institutional knowledge can be accumulated and lessons learnt
can inform future practices. Such reflection could also serve to put education higher
up on the agenda when defining budgets and priorities for complex emergencies.