Closer to the frontlines: rethinking education financing in protracted crises

This article was originally published here by ODI Global.

In protracted crises, parents spend significant shares of their household budgets on schooling, often because they see education as their children’s only hope for a better future. This has been a consistent message through recent ERICC consortium analyses and previous ODI research on aid coordination, in which we spoke with teachers, civil society, ministry officials, humanitarian cluster coordinators, and education donors in South Sudan, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and beyond.

Crises now last a decade on average, nearly a child’s whole education cycle. Yet some actors in the aid system continue to rank education as a low priority, neglecting its importance in helping children, who constitute about half of those displaced by conflict, to develop capabilities beyond basic survival. Recent aid cuts have hit education particularly hard, driving questions about what the education aid architecture for fragile contexts should look like going forward. Reform ideas gaining traction include a greater emphasis on multilateral funding over bilateral funding, and the simplification of an aid architecture that arguably is overly complex, duplicative, and therefore, inefficient.

On average, global direct aid to basic education has been about $3.9 billion a year in recent years, with two multilateral funds accounting for a substantial share: the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) which disbursed nearly $1billion (around 25–27%) in 2024, and Education Cannot Wait (ECW) which disbursed just over $200 million in 2024 (around 5%). With both GPE and ECW approaching major replenishments, debates around new institutional arrangements and governance for the two funds are under way.

What needs more prioritisation in sector discussions, however, is how any restructuring can channel a greater share of education aid directly to crisis-affected actors, who have long called for localisation of aid, while also ensuring that external financing is anticipatory, flexible, and sustainable.

Blurred GPE and ECW boundaries in protracted crises

Initially, ECW was designed to respond rapidly at the onset of a crisis, with GPE providing continuity as the crisis becomes protracted. Our research has found that at times this sequencing has worked: in Uganda, refugee teacher salaries moved smoothly from ECW to GPE; in Bangladesh, ECW supported Rohingya refugees while GPE backed longer-term national reforms.

Yet in other contexts, the boundaries between the two funds are less clear. With more than half of GPE’s operations now in fragile contexts, ECW’s Multi-Year Resilience Programmes (MYRPs) increasingly overlap with GPE’s long-term grants and often share the same international grant agents. South Sudan illustrates the challenge: with both ECW’s MYRP and GPE’s ESP (Education Sector Plan) running concurrently, significant efforts at alignment were made, yet many government officials and NGO education specialists on the ground saw them instead as duplicative, parallel processes. In their view, there was limited government involvement in setting priorities, as the MYRP was finalised first, and thus had effectively set national education sector priorities. This duplication left country actors with a perception of added bureaucracy but no greater access to resources, mirroring broader frustrations with slow progress in localising humanitarian responses.

Bottlenecks and inconsistent response speed

In acute crises, speed is critical. ECW has made an effort to distinguish itself from GPE for rapid disbursement, but results have been mixed. ECW’s First Emergency Response (FER) in Nigeria enabled temporary learning spaces within months of displacement, and the South Sudan MYRP crisis modifier allowed instant funding when refugees arrived from Sudan. But elsewhere, the process has been considerably slower. In oPt/Palestine, a FER approved in late 2024 was not disbursed until mid-2025, missing the academic cycle, with procedural issues typically blamed for much of the delay. Meanwhile GPE operates at a much larger scale but faces persistent disbursement delays. Nearly half of active grants in recent years carried significant undisbursed balances, and in some cases funds sat idle for over a year after approval. In Malawi, a large programme grant saw less than 20% disbursed two years into implementation, reportedly due to procurement bottlenecks and capacity gaps. Donor interviewees have flagged this as a systemic weakness, with GPE’s disbursement performance often judged ‘sub-optimal.’

Limited capacity for predictable, flexible, financing

Speed matters in the first months; predictability matters in the long haul. With rapid fluctuations in the levels of aid, children face a patchwork of short-term projects that collapse when funding cycles end. At the same time, in contexts of protracted polycrisis and climate change, needs are in constant flux. There are examples of GPE using crisis modifiers and adaptive design. In Sudan, GPE’s Accelerated Funding was woven into ECW’s MYRP to redirect resources to flood-affected areas. In Myanmar, GPE grant pivoted to address teacher attrition. ECW has also deployed crisis modifiers and pivots: in South Sudan, a MYRP modifier allowed instant funding when refugees arrived from Sudan, and in Ukraine earlier systemic investments enabled a rapid pivot to displaced learners. But scaling this flexibility requires going further, by, for example, cultivating and pre-approving local partners in high-risk contexts and setting pre-agreed thresholds for rapid, small-scale disbursements to them. Moreover, greater attention should be given to supporting the establishment of domestically-led anticipatory financing that enables rapid response as well as sustained, flexible support throughout a crisis.

Insufficient emphasis on learning and transparency

Both GPE and ECW face a shared challenge: while they mobilise funds and deliver system inputs, evidence of actual learning gains remains weak. Our research found local actors often pointing to classrooms built or teachers trained, but with little clarity on whether these translated into improved reading, numeracy, or retention. GPE finances sector plans and education system inputs, yet only 28% of children reach minimum reading proficiency in partner countries. GPE’s recent revisions to the Results Framework, aimed at tracking learning outcomes more systematically as a benchmark of investment effectiveness, is a step in the right direction. ECW has similarly offered limited learning outcome evidence to date, but its new Holistic Learning Outcomes Measurement Handbook is seeking to strengthen outcome measurements. These moves are welcome as overall transparency of humanitarian education sector provision on the impact of their interventions remains worryingly limited with most reporting confined to aggregated figures on ‘children reached’. Greater detail and clearer articulation of not only learning outcomes, but also what was delivered, i.e. types of education interventions, their scope and depth, would enable greater understanding of what works to improve learning in protracted crises, and strengthen the case for increased funding.

Localisation: a key test of reform

In response to these concerns, an on-going debate about ECW’s institutional home has resurfaced. Some argue for a merger with GPE, while others favour maintaining separate entities but with clearer mandates, and relocating ECW outside of UNICEF.

However, a more crucial question for any upcoming restructure is whether donors will preserve the status quo of heavy reliance on international intermediaries, or push for reforms that make aid more directly supportive of actors designing and delivering crises response on the ground. In 2022, over half (59%) of ECW funding was provided to UN agencies, while national NGOs delivering education received less than 1% directly. For the 2023/24 financial year, ECW reported that 29% has been allocated ‘as directly as possible’ to local actors, though this was still channelled to a large extent via sub-grants and foreign intermediaries. GPE has greater constraints in this regard as it primarily channels funds through governments, with around 70% of grants implemented by ministries of education, and smaller support to national civil society advocacy efforts.

Any redesign of the aid architecture must recognise that foreign aid makes up a small part of overall education sector financing and service delivery. Even in protracted crises, most of the heavy lifting is done by governments and communities, often outside the public system. And yet the aid system often works around these efforts, rather than supporting them. In Northeast Nigeria, government-led and the humanitarian-led coordination groups worked in isolation from each other. In Cox’s Bazar, there has been very little engagement with community-led education initiatives. Merging multilateral funding organisations or changing their institutional homes is unlikely to resolve these deeper issues.

Shifting power and resources closer to where crises are managed requires rethinking how aid is channelled into protracted crisis contexts, specifically to:

• Strengthen alignment between GPE and ECW so that their financing instruments are sequenced and complementary, with end users experiencing continuity of support from immediate crisis response to longer-term system strengthening
• Place learning outcomes and accountability to communities at the heart of new aid architecture design
• Incentivise implementing agencies to coordinate, share data and disseminate lessons on what works to improve learning outcomes
• Ensure that pledges to shift resources closer to crisis frontlines are enabled by donors, and not left to chance

This material has been funded by UK International Development from the UK government. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed here are entirely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the ERICC Programme, the authors’ respective organisations, or the UK government’s official policies. Copyright lies with the authors; however, as per ERICC contracts, the authors have granted permission for the non-commercial use of the intellectual property to ERICC Research Programme Consortium, and by extension to the funder.