ECW MHPSS Blog Update: World Mental Health Day

ECW is marking World Mental Health Day by re-affirming our commitment that mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is and will continue to be a vital component of every country investment ECW funds. Without addressing the mental health and wellbeing of girls, boys, adolescents and teachers in crisis contexts the international community falls short on its commitment to provide meaningful and relevant education to the world’s most vulnerable children. ECW and other key partners, including the Inter-Agency network of Education in Emergencies (INEE) and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), are leading the charge in ensuring that mental health is finally given prominent focus in humanitarian and education responses.

To advance this agenda, ECW is proud to announce 3 new MHPSS-related global-level partnerships that have formed in the past 3 months.

COVID-19 presented a challenge to the EiE sector like one we have not seen before.  Immediately at the onset, IASC’s MHPSS Reference Group, co hosted by IFRC’s PS Centre and WHO, rapidly produced MHPSS COVID-19 guidance documents, programmes, trainings and communities of practice to ensure MHPSS was included in the response to school closures. ECW reached out to IACS’s co-chair, IFRC’s PS Centre, in order to join other donors to fund this life-saving work, and is proud to have engaged in a formal partnership in July 2020.

Teacher Wellbeing (TWB) and teachers’ mental health is a topic that has long been neglected. As of August 2020, ECW is funding INEE’s psychosocial support and social emotional learning (PSS/SEL) and Teachers in Crisis Contexts (TICC) Collaboratives to continue their ground-breaking work on TWB and, together with INEE members, create a practical toolkit so education teams can put concrete interventions in place to better support teachers in displacement, conflict and natural disaster contexts.

In order for the ECW Secretariat’s technical team to continue providing country teams evidence-informed guidance and research on best practice approaches to MHPSS in EiE, ECW entered into a Letter of agreement with Columbia University’s Protection and Care (CPC) Learning Network in September 2020. This agreement enables CPC and ECW to collaborate on MHPSS in EiE research to inform the technical support ECW provides to partners in the field.

Along with these new partnerships, the ECW Secretariat has published its first ever MHPSS Technical Guidance Note, to walk grantees through developing MHPSS aspects of FER and MYRP proposals. Along with that, a MHPSS in EiEPC Theory of Change and Indicator Library was also crafted to encourage grantees to use structured, goal-oriented, evidence-informed MHPSS interventions, tailored and targeted to meet the unique MHPSS needs of the most marginalized groups.

Through these new initiatives, and ensuring MHPSS is part and parcel of education– ECW and partners are believe we are helping tap into and unleashing the unlimited potential of girls, boys and adolescents in forced displacement, armed conflict and natural disaster settings.