Supporting Teachers in Crisis Contexts: What the Evidence Tells Us

 Teachers working in crisis and displacement settings have different backgrounds, legal statuses, and pathways into teaching. Across national, refugee, internally displaced, and returnee profiles, teachers may be formally trained or unqualified, employed by governments or I/NGOs, and working in camps, settlements, or host communities.

Despite these differences, teachers in education in emergencies and protracted crises (EiEPC) face a set of common challenges: overcrowded classrooms; learners with diverse language and psychosocial needs; scarce materials; weak infrastructure; and, in some contexts, exposure to violence and displacement themselves.

The EiE community has long documented and sought to address these recurring challenges in teacher management, particularly around pay and professional development. Recent and forthcoming research from the Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crises (ERICC) programme examines these efforts in depth, synthesising the available research across the teacher management cycle in crisis-affected settings.

Drawing on these reviews, this blog summarises  key trends, tensions, and promising practices for teacher management in EiEPC. Building on this research knowledge, it highlights some practical entry points for policy and programmatic actions addressing challenges faced by teachers in crisis settings.

Fragmentation is a defining feature of teacher management systems in EiEPC

Across conflict and protracted crisis settings, education systems often constitute multiple actors, including national governments, humanitarian and development actors, private providers and local non-state actors. In many contexts, the lack of effective coordination among different actors leads to incoherence and fragmentation of education delivery. Particularly, there are visible inconsistencies around teacher recruitment, management of the educational workforce, teacher pay and provisions of teacher professional development. A few examples demonstrate this pattern:

• Disparate salaries: Research from Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Uganda, among others, shows that teacher compensation varies widely depending on the employing entity—which can range from governments, civil society organisations, UN agencies, and faith-based actors—leading to repeated calls for pay harmonisation, particularly for refugee teachers.
   
• Incomplete data: Evidence from Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Liberia shows that teacher documentation and workforce data (e.g. payroll registration) are often siloed, incomplete, or inconsistent across employers and regions—shaped by conflict and post-recovery dynamics—making it difficult to track teacher pay and other key information efficiently.
   
• Teacher Professional Development (TPD) in silos: While some TPD initiatives successfully embrace partnerships with teachers in co-creating knowledge, the majority of these efforts are led by I/NGOs or universities operating outside national systems, limiting their ability to offer recognised qualifications or support long-term career pathways.

Overall, the evidence suggests that fragmentation is a central constraint shaping teacher recruitment, management, and support in EiEPC. As such, the impacts of operating within fragmented systems need to be a core consideration in teacher policy design—both in efforts to align systems where possible, and in recognising and working pragmatically within fragmentation where alignment may not be feasible.

Despite fragmentation, the evidence shows promising examples of initiatives working with/in national systems

A common thread across these promising examples is the use of flexible and more inclusive approaches. These initiatives are usually implemented by multistakeholder partnerships, with a focus on hiring refugee and displaced teachers, diversifying the teacher workforce, and aligning pathways into recognised systems (either locally or at the national level) and institutions. Illustrative examples from the evidence include:

• Flexible recruitment of displaced teachers: In Mali, post-2012 Ministry of Education policies and the openness of school management committees enabled displaced teachers to take up temporary teaching roles in host communities, helping sustain education provision during displacement.
   
• Teaching assistant roles for refugee teachers: In Poland, UNICEF-supported civil society organisations recruited and trained Ukrainian refugees to support displaced learners’ linguistic and psychosocial needs in public schools.
   
• Pathways to recognised certification: In Chad, refugee teachers (primarily from Sudan) can obtain nationally recognised primary and secondary teaching certifications through teacher training colleges, supported by UNHCR and I/NGO partnerships and scholarship provision, and leading to increased professional recognition and, in some cases, improved wages. Such efforts can also be delivered digitally: on the Thai–Myanmar border, refugee and migrant communities, working with UK-based researchers, created short online courses that prepare teachers for entry into an internationally recognised distance teacher development programme at the University of London, enabling them to gain recognised qualifications at low costs.

However, these initiatives are not without limitations. For example, flexible recruitment mechanisms often rely on temporary or informal arrangements that limit job security, benefits, and long-term career progression. Similarly, teaching assistant roles for refugee teachers frequently involve teacher-level responsibilities without commensurate pay or professional development, or pathways into full teaching roles. 

Overall, the evidence shows that flexible and inclusive teacher management policies can enable responsiveness and educational continuity in crisis settings, but without deliberate safeguards it can also reinforce inequities and financial difficulties for teachers.

Progressive and promising policy efforts exist, but are often limited by implementation challenges 

Even where promising and inclusive teacher policies exist, they face several implementation challenges, with funding being a persistent barrier.

Evidence from Malawi illustrates this tension: World Bank–supported reforms in 2017 introduced a data-driven and participatory approach to teacher deployment, engaging head teachers, village chiefs, and District Education Managers to classify schools by remoteness, prioritise staffing in the most underserved areas, and include hardship allowances for teachers. While the approach showed strong potential to drive data-driven decision-making, the allowances have yet to be implemented due to funding constraints—highlighting the gap between policy design and execution. A similar pattern was observed in Kaduna State, Nigeria, where a teacher recruitment, deployment and retention policy developed in 2019 has faced several implementation barriers, including weak data systems and insufficient funding.

These examples illustrate how persistent implementation challenges continue to limit the impact of promising teacher policies in EiEPC. More implementation research is needed—particularly research that centres teachers’ voices and alternative ways of supporting teachers with livelihood costs—to understand what enables policy impact in conflict and displacement settings, and at what cost.

Despite ongoing funding constraints, the evidence shows promising initiatives for teacher salaries

Across conflict and displacement settings, inadequate salaries—followed closely by the absence of non-monetary benefits such as housing or transport—is consistently identified as the biggest challenge for managing teachers and improving teacher quality, and the primary driver of attrition. As we have seen in earlier examples, however, levels of teacher compensation in crisis settings often vary and are inequitable.

Yet the evidence surfaces promising practices (with caveats) in ensuring and sustaining teacher pay: 

• Donor collaboration: In Afghanistan, the World Bank-administered Afghanistan Resilience Trust Fund (ARTF) has coordinated funding from multiple donors to support equitable stipends for teachers in community-based education, which has since supported the recruitment and compensation of over 5,000 teachers—38% women—reaching more than 160,000 children.
   
• Salary harmonisation:  In Sudan, prior to the 2023 conflict, refugee teachers certified by the federal ministry were temporarily paid at government rates. Positive examples of salary harmonisation have also been documented in Uganda and Myanmar’s Rakhine State. However, in Sudan, this harmonisation reduced overall salary levels, contributing to teacher attrition and parental concern over declining education quality—indicating that harmonisation without adequate financing can do more harm than good.
   
• Direct funding to supplement or pay teacher salaries: Beyond harmonisation, some donors have directly supplemented teacher pay. The EU-funded IMPACT project in South Sudan provided quarterly incentives to around 30,000 primary school teachers between 2017 and 2021. While not providing a liveable wage, the initiative appears to have improved teacher attendance, motivation, and retention (especially during the Covid pandemic), supported by accountability mechanisms such as attendance monitoring and a biometric HR information system. 

The evidence suggests that teacher pay requires stronger prioritisation within humanitarian and development financing, closer coordination between donors, ministries, and other actors to align pay schemes, and sustained advocacy for allowances such as hardship, housing, or transport. Grounding these efforts in labour market analyses can help ensure compensation levels move closer to a living wage, rather than perpetuating short-term or inequitable stopgaps. 

Overall, the evidence base offers a rich set of promising practices, gap analyses, and case studies for teacher management across EiEPC. While the insights from these impactful interventions are valuable, they need to be cautiously adapted in different conflict settings. Each setting is shaped by distinct political economy dynamics that influence education systems, governance structures, and the experiences of teachers. Approaches that are effective in one context therefore require careful adaptation in another.

These insights were drawn from recent and forthcoming ERICC research on teacher management and professional development. Access the full reports and other studies here. 

Note: As of 26 February 2026, minor edits have been made to the text to improve accuracy and clarify language and grammar. The overall examples, analysis, and key messages remain unchanged.

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.