Education in Emergencies: Evidence for Action (3EA)

With the launch of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, global leaders acknowledged that SDG 4 - Quality Education, will never be achieved without renewed commitment to education in crisis settings. The momentum to increase funding for education is promising and urgently needed. But without a more robust evidence base for Education in Emergencies (EiE), funders, implementers, and policymakers will lack the knowledge required to make sound decisions about the most effective programs in which to invest scarce time and resources.

Without evidence, decisions will continue to be based on intuition and, most importantly, children in crisis contexts will continue to be denied the opportunity to receive a quality, safe education that we know offers them the chance to build the social-emotional and academic skills they need to survive and thrive.

3EA aimed to inform and build the capacity of stakeholders in EiE by:

1. Generating actionable evidence in conflict- and crisis-affected settings on the effectiveness and implementation quality of the programs designed to improve children’s holistic learning and development.

2. Building, contributing to, and disseminating contextually relevant tools and methods to measure these programs.

Impact:

The 3EA initiative aimed to iteratively implement and test practices to identify not only what works to improve children’s holistic learning and development and program implementation quality, but also how, for whom, and under what conditions.

Working in three countries affected by conflict or crisis – Lebanon, Niger, and Sierra Leone – the 3EA initiative evaluated a set of education and social and emotional skills programs targeted at improving children’s stress, executive functioning, and basic academic skills in emergency contexts.

Measurement and Metrics:

Through 3EA, Global TIES for Children and partners designed, adapted, tested, and built capacity to use high-quality children’s holistic learning and development and program implementation quality measurement tools and methods. We did so by conducting a scoping study of the field and ultimately convening a consortium of research-practice partnerships, first in the Middle East/North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) region.

• The 3EA E-Cubed project examined children’s holistic learning and development as well as program implementation in three crisis-affected contexts.