This special issue of JEiE offers new insights into the gendered experiences of girls and boys seeking quality education in contexts of conflict and crisis. The featured authors demonstrate the role scholarly and practice-based evidence can play in keeping education systems and providers accountable for gender parity in education access and quality for children and youth affected by emergencies.

Nicola Jones and coauthors share insights they gained from 3,030 student surveys and 40 key informant interviews on the compounding effects COVID-19 has had on existing legal and cultural barriers to education access for Rohingya and Syrian refugees. They specifically note the exacerbating effects the pandemic has had on girls’ enrollment.

In a study of ten countries, Nicole Dulieu, Silvia Arlini, Mya Gordon, and Allyson Krupar suggest that displaced boys who reported learning “nothing” or “a little bit” during COVID-19 school closures tied these perceptions to feeling sad or worried, and to increased violence at home. Girls more often connected their feelings about learning less during COVID with material and economic barriers.

Carine Allaf, Julia Dicum, and Ruth Naylor, the lead editors of this Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies, reflect on the key questions that shaped the scope and development of this issue and summarize the learning presented in each article.

In this field note, Abdul Badi Sayibu considers the phone-based surveys that Plan International used to assess the reach of and participation in its Making Ghanaian Girls Great Program. He suggests this is a viable method for collecting sex-disaggregated data in vulnerable and hard-to-reach contexts, and for facilitating rapid analyses of data for EiE program decisionmaking.

In her review of UNESCO’s GEMR Gender Report 2019 and INEE’s Mind the Gap report, Nora Fyles comments on the status of the evidence base on girls’ education and the progress the EiE field has made in responding to the ambitions of the 2018 Charlevoix Declaration.

The report share research findings and recommendations drawn from qualitative data gathered in humanitarian con- texts in three countries and continents—Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Lebanon—to understand how children have experienced the impact of COVID-19 school closures on their protection, well-being, and education inequalities. 

This new study proposes a new methodology that leverages the latest, most granular available data on crisis severity, children with functional difficulties, forcibly displaced children, out-of-school rates and data from learning outcomes from databases to estimate of the number of out-of-school children in emergencies and the number of crisis-affected children who may not be learning.

وفقاً لدراسةٍ جديدة أجراها  صندوق "التعليم لا ينتظر"، يُقدَّر عدد الأطفال والمراهقين المتضرّرين من الأزمات الذين يحتاجون إلى دعمٍ تعليميّ بنحو 222 مليون. ويُعدُّ هذا الرقم أعلى بكثير من التقدير السابق البالغ 75 مليوناً في عام 2016 ويشير إلى اتجاهٍ مثير للقلق. ينبغي ألا يُضطرَّ الأطفال إلى انتظار انتهاء الحروب أو حل أزمة المناخ حتى تُتاح لهم الفرصة للتعلُّم والازدهار فسيكون قد فات الأوان.