Education and Fragility
Fragility was a commonly used term in the early 2000s to describe contexts affected by conflict, crisis and/or poor governance. The terminology of “education and fragility” was used to broaden the discussion on education in emergencies (EiE) to look at countries at all stages along the humanitarian-development spectrum as it was felt that EiE was understood as mostly referring to humanitarian crises.
Education is a powerful tool that when designed and implemented well can help a society emerge from conflict towards peace and stability. Schools and classrooms can provide the space in which people of different origins are brought together and taught how to live and work together peacefully.
However, the dynamics in fragile contexts – poor governance, violence, repression, corruption, inequality, and exclusion – can negatively impact the quality of learning that children and youth experience in the classroom and further entrench inequity, division, discrimination, and structural violence along religious, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic lines.
Education’s potential to either mitigate or exacerbate conflict and fragility is a result of nuanced interfaces between education policies, planning, and programming and the drivers and dynamics of conflict and fragility. An understanding of these conditions is critical to ensure that education, at a minimum, does no harm and, at its best, contributes to conflict prevention and long-term peace building.
Key Statistics
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In 2016, education in emergencies received 2.7% of humanitarian aid, well below the target of 4%. Meanwhile, in the past five years, funding requests for education in emergencies have increased by 21%.
- 75 million children aged 3 to 18 live in countries facing war and violence and need educational support.
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Each year of education reduced the risk of conflict by around 20%.
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Children in fragile, conflict-affected countries are more than twice as likely to be out of school compared with those in countries not affected by conflict, adolescents are more than two-thirds more likely to be out of school.
- If the enrollment rate for secondary schooling is 10 percentage points higher than the average, the risk of war is reduced by about 3 percentage points (a decline in risk from 11.5% to 8.6%)
This collection was developed with the support of Susy Ndaruhutse, Head of Education Reform at the Education Development Trust.