Education in emergency: A new way to heal despite Boko Haram

Insurgency has destroyed not just schools but education for children in the North East. Judith Giwa-Amu is an education officer at the United Nations Children’s Fund in Nigeria. She says education is just what children need to heal. But providing education in emergencies doesn’t come easy. The existing educational activities that we have among the […]

Insurgency has destroyed not just schools but education for children in the North East. Judith Giwa-Amu is an education officer at the United Nations Children’s Fund in Nigeria. She says education is just what children need to heal. But providing education in emergencies doesn’t come easy.

The existing educational activities that we have among the internally displaced people, would you call that formal even though they may have physical structures?

Yes, but that would be formal. What we are doing in IDP camps, a lot of the education is delivered through UNICEF support, is formal education. However, among the partners I mentioned we have the USAID educational crisis response that has delivered, I think in the last three years, education to at least 80,000 children. And they are particularly for the non-formal sector but what they do is that they have is an intensive nine months programme during which they deliver non-formal education, basically literacy numeracy life skills, social emotional learning.

They deliver these to children under their care. And then they also prepare that after the nine months the children are mainstreamed. Some parents want their children to continue in non-formal education. It is not by force but generally the idea is that they are mainstreamed into the formal sector after nine months.

So, in the North East in particular, with insurgency destabilising the regular educational system, what alternatives are available for education in emergencies?

The non-formal is a major route.  When you look at it, that is why the non-formal and the formal, we work very well as a sector. I mentioned the coordinator structure, we have non-formal and formal.

This is in terms of intervention. You did mention radio education programme.

We have technologically enhanced learning approaches undertaken by the American university in Adamawa. They have a way they use tablets so, there are different innovative ways. The radio, because of the reach we feel it can reach wider coverage, especially for those children in high-risk areas, those children who are in hard-to-reach areas. It has very strong potentials and it has been piloted by UNICEF, the regional office of UNICEF specifically in Niger and Cameroun. And it has been shown to work very well.

The only thing that has been vital about it is that there must be a way to do (monitoring and evaluation); to make sure that it is being received and to measure learning that has occurred. That is something that they are still working on. Beyond that they have listening groups where children come together, even children that are on the streets – out-of-school children because they know the time. Also, they have gone as far as developing scripts. The UNICEF programme has about 144 scripts which have been translated to Kanuri, Hausa and of course we have the English version.

The scripts are available; it is just to see how we can get assistance, and that might involve, you know, private sector partnership with radio stations towards delivering the education properly; and increasing the coverage because coverage is always the issue.

But I do think that with the kind of resources we have in Nigeria and the political will to do it, I think something can come up, maybe working with NCC I feel something can be done. I have been very excited since I heard about this. I have been in Dakar, and the pilot there was quite successful.