It Can Be Done!

It is possible to deliver education to children affected by armed conflict, forced displacement and climate disasters. It is even possible to do so with speed, inclusion, continuity, and quality.

For years, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of Education Cannot Wait’s (ECW) High-Level Steering Group, the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, led a collective campaign together with UN Member States, UN agencies and Civil Society to make this vision a reality: the establishment of Education Cannot Wait (ECW) at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016.

A global fund based on inclusiveness and partnership, ECW is a multilateral platform in the UN system and pooled funding mechanism. ECW reaches the hardest-hit places on Earth and serves children and adolescents to achieve their potentials and dreams; and, in doing so, also promotes gender equality, reduces hunger and invests in self-sufficiency.

Driven by collective efforts – whereby all stakeholders are members of ECW – it is a funding mechanism that is jointly managed and implemented. It applies the UN Secretary-General’s Reform by driving Joint Programming and advances humanitarian-development-peace complementarity to maximize impact.

As a result, by the end of 2023, ECW had successfully delivered a continued and inclusive quality education to 11 million children and adolescents, currently living amidst war and its extreme poverty, amidst climate-induced disasters, as refugees and internally displaced. In 2023 alone, 5.6 million children and adolescents benefited from ECW’s investments. The number of preschool and school-aged children reached each year by ECW together with our partners is rapidly increasing, building on the system put in place since the inception of the Fund.

This ECW model rests on partnerships, complementarity, speed, connection to the communities we serve, and both a local and global inclusiveness. This is a must because delivering quality education in crisis settings requires expertise in multiple sectors: from school meals, nutrition, water and sanitation to mental health and psychosocial services, early childhood development, academic learning, climate-sensitive approaches, gender-equality, sports, arts, teacher training and fees, infrastructure and protection. In other words, no one can do it alone...

Indeed, those effectively leading in-country coordination of multiple sectors, Matthias Schmale– one of the many UN Resident/Humanitarian Coordinators – reaffirms in this month’s High-Level interview: “Education Cannot Wait investments help to realize the right [to education] for crisis-affected children.”

Working with host governments, communities, parent-teacher associations, UN agencies, civil society, strategic donor partners, teachers and pupils, we jointly ensure that children and adolescents in the world’s worst circumstances can fulfill their right to a holistic education, against all odds.

The biggest challenge is of course the brutal conflicts and climate disasters that are on the rise and threaten the education – and the mere survival – of millions of children. The most responsible and viable action we can take is to halt investments in these utterly destructive man-made disasters and wars. The next biggest challenge is to raise all the financial resources required to manifest #222MillionDreams.

The number of children and adolescents at risk has never been this dramatic in modern history, from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, to Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali and Sudan; from Afghanistan and Somalia to Nigeria and Ukraine, just to mention a few of the over 40 countries and contexts in which ECW invests. One in six children in the world today lives in a conflict zone, facing immediate risks of grave violations of international law, according to Save the Children’s analysis.

In all, there will soon be a quarter of a billion children and adolescents in conflicts and disasters who need our urgent support to go to school and learn. Without our support, they may not survive at all.

It is catastrophic. It is unjustified. It is destructive. It is cruel. It is irresponsible.

It does not have to be this way. We know that we can change each of these lives through the power of education. We have a proven global platform and pooled funding mechanism that is both effective and efficient.

Now, we need the funding to reach the more than 200 million children and adolescents in crises.

It can be done!