Before COVID-19, there were 129 million children out of school in crisis-affected countries, representing half of the world’s out of school population. While progress has been made towards achieving universal education, reaching these “last-mile” children has continued to prove elusive. Even before the pandemic, they were at risk of being forgotten by the international community. All our best efforts: double-shifting, accelerating learning programs, and tech-enabled interventions have failed to help the large number of out-of-school children in crisis contexts gain access to quality learning opportunities.

And now, as a result of COVID-19, the last mile just got longer: at the time of writing there were over 1 billion children around the world whose schools have closed — that’s over 60% of all school-aged children. Children’s access to physical schools and trained teachers are now even more limited. This is troubling because evidence shows that once a child’s education is interrupted, they are less likely to return even if schools do resume. Our efforts to create low-cost mechanisms to accelerate access to quality learning will be needed now more than ever.

The IRC’s geographic footprint makes us well-placed to transform education for the children left behind in conflict and crisis. We already reach 1.6 million children in over 20 countries. Our goal is to build low-cost mechanisms to accelerate access to learning, facilitate grouping and teaching by ability, track progress, and adapt to individualized learning needs — both in response to the pandemic and for the post-COVID-19 world. To do this, we are addressing four critical challenges:

1. High-quality localized and contextualized teaching and learning materials. ​Often existing teaching and learning materials are difficult for teachers and children to understand and use; requiring expensive training that still does not result in the desired impact. Leveraging our in-house designers, behavioral scientists, content specialists, and field teams across 20 countries, we’re able to iteratively co-create and rapidly test materials with education officials, teachers, children, and parents — even during COVID-19.
2. Expanding delivery channels for content.​ Current approaches are too expensive to scale, only reach a small portion of the children in need, and often do not provide the quality needed to help children achieve learning outcomes. We are working on home-based delivery channels as well as locally-driven innovative solutions that forge partnerships between governments, private sector, and religious institutions to extend reach.
3. Scale and cost-effectiveness. In addition to engaging local actors to ensure content and solutions are desirable, easy to implement, and aligned with local values, our economists and education specialists will focus on comparing and testing the solutions that will reach the most kids with learning gains at the lowest cost.
4. Adaptive learning. ​Many children don’t have access to online teachers or content, nor the hardware needed to access them. Our vision is to deliver low-cost tablets uploaded with adaptive learning software and solar power panels needed to sustain these tablets to all households affected by crisis, including content on social-emotional learning, which we know is crucial to supporting parents and children during crises.

Throughout the IRC’s 87-year history, education programs have been an essential part of the IRC’s response in working with people affected by conflict and crisis. We’ve reached 1.3 million grade one and grade two students across seven provinces in Pakistan to improve reading education and student reading outcomes. With Creative as our partner, we’ve provided 20,000 out-of-school children between the ages of 9–14 in Nigeria with an Accelerated Learning Program that significantly improved their basic literacy, numeracy and social-emotional skills, and effectively reduced learning equity gaps for the most disadvantaged, including girls, displaced children, disabled children, and children from poor households. In Bangladesh, we’ve implemented an adaptive learning pilot for over 600 Rohingya refugee children and found preliminary evidence that a tablet-based, autonomous learning program can enable out-of-school displaced children to acquire foundational literacy, numeracy and social-emotional skills such as hope and agency. And we’ve piloted a virtual teacher coaching program designed to empower teachers to learn and practice social-emotional learning activities in their classrooms with some preliminary success.

Now we’re beginning to localize content in Nigeria, Tanzania, and the Middle East in response to COVID-19 and have already begun delivering educational content through radio and SMS in Lebanon, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Over the next year, we will transform the way we deliver educational content to ensure that children affected by humanitarian crises and COVID-19 receive quality learning. ​We will aim to provide low-cost, scalable and proven solutions so that children in crisis-affected countries denied education have access to quality, last-mile learning.

This is one of three global research and innovation priorities at the IRC. Learn more.