Six key themes for scaling humanitarian education innovations
Learnings from the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA)
Protracted crises demand education interventions that can innovate, adapt and scale to meet the enormous challenge of ensuring all children and youth realise their right to education.
However, more is known about the barriers to scale in humanitarian settings (such as unstable funding, etc.) than about its enablers. Coupled with a lack of evidence around what works and what does not work to improve learning outcomes in the humanitarian education space, it is challenging for donors, policymakers and practitioners to identify which interventions to scale, and how.
The Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) has been working to better understand the impact of humanitarian education innovations on learning and psychosocial outcomes, as well as the process of scaling in protracted crisis settings. Over the past three years, the HEA team — DFID, UNICEF, UNHCR, HEA External Evaluation Firm, American Institutes for Research (AIR) and HEA scaling expert, Ian Gray of Gray Dot Catalyst — have had the opportunity to observe, evaluate and bring together learnings on scaling humanitarian education innovations.
We highlight here some of the preliminary learnings and recommendations coming out of the HEA, under six key thematic areas — government engagement, partnerships, funding, scaling strategy, programme adaptation and generating evidence:
1 .Government Engagement
Findings:
The HEA has observed a crucial role for Ministries of Education (MoEs) in scaling Education in Emergency (EiE) innovations. Offering the potential of a sustainable framework for expansion through a national system, MoEs are both the education experts and the primary ‘customers’ for humanitarian education innovations in a given context. The MoE role in scaling humanitarian education innovations therefore goes beyond their regulatory function, positioning them as key partners and facilitators for sustainable scale.
Recommendations:
Relationship building, stakeholder mapping and long-term engagement with MoEs are key components of the scaling journey. This work is not without its challenges, taking significant time and financial investment. The HEA therefore recommends that innovations:
- Start engaging as early as practicable for your programme and context;
- Engage at different levels, from local government and field locations to national, to ensure there is comprehensive buy-in;
- Invest time in understanding national education systems and aligning your approach with the priorities and systems of the MoE;
- Ensure your innovation is grounded in evidence by building in a proof of concept at the start of programme implementation;
- Promote MoE ownership, particularly for longer term sustainability and national system strengthening;
- Build in time for delays and ensure MoE engagement is factored into humanitarian education innovations’ implementation planning.
2. Partnerships
Findings:
The HEA has recognised that effective partnerships — whether with other humanitarian actors, development actors, the private sector or government — are another key component for sustainably scaling humanitarian education innovations.
All five of the HEA grantees were involved in some form of partnership during the development and/or scaling of their innovation. However, the HEA found that understanding how to assess, build, maintain and review partnerships at different points in the scaling journey is often limited.
Recommendations:
- Ensure that partnership building, assessment, maintenance and review are factored into planning for scale.
- Building understanding of partnership methodologies and partnership management, as well as developing process and outcome metrics for partnerships, would benefit from further focus and funding when bringing innovations (in humanitarian education or otherwise) to scale.
3. Funding
Findings:
The HEA observed the impact that short term, emergency driven humanitarian funding cycles can have upon humanitarian education innovations reaching their full scaling potential. In the absence of access to longer term funding for the development of components that ensure sustainable and efficient scaling of an intervention, innovations are often incentivised to move into new contexts (driven by the availability of funding), before they have honed the sustainability of their intervention. This can lead them to operate in a ‘Perpetual Pilot’ mode, where a lack of available time and resources to build in key components for sustainability — such as an identified business model, adding in missing components and features, codifying the innovation and connecting with the ecosystem in a sustainable way — impacts their potential for sustainable scale.
Since the start of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), an education in emergencies (EiE) fund, the share of humanitarian aid going to EiE has increased from 3.5 to 4% (UNICEF, 2018). ECW has the potential to help facilitate larger-scale and longer-term funding for humanitarian education innovations, supporting humanitarian organisations to refocus some of their programming from pilot projects to programmes at scale. In order to do this successfully, both humanitarian organisations and donors need to understand how to finance innovative programmes to scale.
Recommendations:
- To avoid humanitarian education innovations falling into perpetual pilot mode, donors should make longer term, stage-gated funding envelopes available, which are aligned with the longer term nature of the scaling process.
- Generating rigorous evidence about what works in humanitarian education settings should be a top priority for both EiE practitioners and donors, reflected in adequate investment and incentives to generate rigorous evidence.
4. Scaling Strategy
Findings:
Identifying sustainable and scalable business models for humanitarian education innovations, which take into account the ‘market’ that humanitarian education innovations operate in (specifically around working with governments and with limited revenue), is extremely important. Without a clear understanding of the business model of their innovation and its sustainability, humanitarian education innovators will find themselves on a long and bumpy road to scale, without a map to guide them.
Recommendations:
- Identify a business model that is clear, suited to the programme and context, scalable and sustainable. This includes building in the required time to ensure that your programme and model is clearly documented and understood by your team, wider organisation and partners.
- In order for innovation teams to implement their business models, they need adequate resources to strengthen their administrative, programmatic and organisational management, particularly when their innovation is managed by a small team, in order to achieve organisational buy-in that supports the further growth and incorporation of the innovation at scale.
5. Programme adaptation
Findings:
Achieving significant gains in learning outcomes can be challenging in humanitarian settings, due to the prevalence and acuteness of implementation challenges in that context. Using rigorous research to understand these challenges and their impact upon learning outcomes is therefore important, as is adaptation of programming to address them, once they are identified and understood.
HEA research found that all HEA teams were flexible and adapted their programmes based on community needs, changing circumstances, and shifting donor priorities. In addition, the HEA teams had to build time into their programme design to ensure that the content they were providing was suited to the different contexts they were operating in.
Recommendations:
- Based upon data and evidence gathered through strong monitoring and evaluation systems, and existing evidence about the impact of education programmes, practitioners should ensure that they remain flexible, building in the space for programme adaptation to their design, as well as appropriate channels for identifying and addressing changing community needs and shifting priorities.
- Programme content should be adapted to language, culture and national curriculum content in a given context, in order to ensure alignment with community needs as well as national systems, and enhance scalability.
6. Generating Evidence
Findings:
Evaluations can better contribute to the successful scale-up of education programmes in humanitarian contexts if they include mixed-methods research, including impact and process evaluations. However, the number of mixed-method evaluations will increase only if researchers are able to deal with challenges that are specific to conducting research in humanitarian contexts.
Data collection in refugee camps, settlements or other areas densely populated with refugees can be challenging for enumerators who do not reside in those areas. This can be due to security concerns for the populations and researchers themselves, or due to issues around trust of data collectors who are not a part of the community, limiting the information populations are willing to share. In crisis contexts, where programme implementation has to be continuously adapted to changing circumstances, research design for a programme evaluation has to be flexible enough to adapt to a continuously evolving theory of change and activities. Due to the need to protect vulnerable populations, numerous approvals may be required to conduct research in crisis settings (for example, from local institutional review boards, relevant government institutions and organisations focused on refugee rights). This can serve to slow the process of conducting evaluations, which has a knock on effect on the execution of the wider M&E framework.
Recommendations:
- Researchers should consider using a sequential data collection strategy, using mixed methods, when implementing evaluations in humanitarian settings.
- Researchers need to consider providing data collection training to and working with individuals already residing in insecure settings, who are trusted by the community and familiar with the context. This not only helps in enhancing the efficacy of data collection in face of security or trust issues but also provides a capacity building opportunity to develop the skills of those within the community.
- Researchers and research commissioners must partner with local research firms when planning and budgeting for data collection in humanitarian settings, to streamline processes for obtaining multiple ethical and government approvals.
- Researchers need to show flexibility and have a back up plan for when disruptive events limit their opportunities to collect data in unstable contexts.
The above learnings are brought together in our meta evaluation report (due for release in November 2019) as well as research papers, policy briefs, case studies and articles, which will be available here on the HEA Learning Series soon. Follow us to join the conversation and be the first to know when we publish new research and learnings.
