Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to share the 34th issue of the Global Education Cluster (GEC) newsletter. The GEC newsletters are issued on a quarterly basis to allow for a strong focus on the work, challenges and successes of country clusters with a feature on one country cluster in each edition. In this edition we highlight a brief recently published by the Education Cluster in Chad. In the remainder of the newsletter, you will find an update on the GEC work, including Rapid Response Team (RRT) members' deployments, global events and the latest resources related to education in emergencies. Please share this newsletter with colleagues, partners, country-level Education Cluster members and other colleagues who might find the information and contacts useful.
CHAD: Rethinking Education in Emergencies Interventions to Break the Vicious Cycle of Underdevelopment and Humanitarian Crisis
Chad is a landlocked country sharing a border with the Central African Republic (CAR), Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger; humanitarian crises in these neighbouring countries have impacted Chad. Since 2013, more than 140,000 refugees and Chadian returnees from CAR have settled in refugee camps, returnee sites and in local villages in the south of Chad. Continuous instability and occasional outbreaks of violence in north western CAR created additional influx of more than 6,000 CAR refugees since 2016. Classrooms are overcrowded and teachers and students attend classes without any adequate teaching and learning materials. In the Lake Chad Basin, instability caused by violent Boko Haram attacks displaced thousands of Nigerians. Military operations in response to the attacks further forced the local population to flee their homes and become IDPs. Even before the crisis, the region was known for harsh living conditions and the absence of infrastructure and basic social services including education. Lack of access to education and high illiteracy rates prepared the ground for recruitment of new extremists and amplified the effects of the crisis. Moreover, Sudanese refugees from Darfur are living in eastern regions of Chad since the beginning of the Darfur conflict in 2003. As the crisis continues for more than a decade, the Chadian government has made efforts to integrate refugee children in the national school curriculum. Despite these efforts, schools in the refugee camps still face many challenges due to the lack of resources in the context where the local population and the government are struggling with problems of their own.
Structural weaknesses, underdevelopment and the lack of infrastructure and basic social services significantly worsen the impacts of the crises, the complex nature of the problem is especially visible in the education sector. Following the sharp fall of oil prices, the government suspended payment of subsidies for community teachers. This led to teachers going on strike for more than two years, resulting in the shutdown of more than 20% of primary schools located in crisis zones in 2015-2016. In the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year, civil servant teachers also went on strike against new government measures cutting bonus payouts and called for payment of salary arrears. As a result, public schools in the crisis zones remained closed for the first four months of the school year preventing both displaced and host community children from accessing education and causing a major setback to emergency education activities planned for these children.
Analyses show that the situation in Chad should be addressed as part of a broader effort to overcome the traditional divide between humanitarian and development interventions. Actions should optimize available resources to respond to the immediate and long-term needs of the affected population. Given the complex nature of humanitarian crises in Chad intensified by existing vulnerabilities of the local population, the Chad Education Cluster is focusing its strategy on responding to the immediate needs of the affected population (host communities, refugees, returnees and IDPs), whilst laying the foundation for longer term actions, by putting the affected communities at the centre of interventions. To find out more on the education situation and the Education Cluster response in Chad, read the thematic paper Rethinking Education in Emergencies Interventions to Break the Vicious Cycle of Underdevelopment and Humanitarian Crisis. Additional information on the work of the Education Cluster can be found on HR.info.