As over a million children in Gaza continue to bear the brunt of the conflict, and an entire generation of Syrian children solemnly mark 13 years of protracted crisis, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Sesame Workshop urge the global community to invest in new approaches to crisis-response as evidenced in a landmark report Transforming Tomorrow: Innovative Solutions for Children in Crisis.
The report draws on the successes of the Ahlan Simsim initiative—the largest Early Childhood Development (ECD) intervention in the history of humanitarian response—reaching millions of children and caregivers across the Middle East with the support they need to learn, grow, and thrive. Experts involved with Ahlan Simsim have outlined crucial learnings and recommendations for what it takes to deliver innovative solutions in the most complex settings and to sustain impact for children. With more than 460 million children across the world currently living in conflict zones, the report’s findings offer hope for some of the world’s biggest challenges today–extending far beyond the region and the early childhood sector.
David Miliband, President & CEO of the IRC, says: “Early childhood interventions have long been one of the most underfunded parts of the humanitarian sector despite evidence that this kind of intervention is one of the best investments. After six years of Ahlan Simsim, we have not only pioneered groundbreaking new approaches to reaching children and families with vital early learning and development support, we have also proven the impact in crisis settings. From remote preschool programs to early childhood support in primary healthcare services, the evidence is now clear on the value of this investment. The need for effective intervention could not be more urgent. Today more than 15 million children are out of school in the Middle East region due to conflict and crisis. In Gaza, around 1.7 million people are estimated to have been internally displaced – half of them children. These children need quality early childhood support and they need it now.”
The Transforming Tomorrow: Innovative Solutions for Children in Crisis report is a blueprint for how to overhaul and strengthen current ways of working in crisis-affected contexts. Ahlan Simsim proves that the world can deliver transformational change at scale, even in the most difficult circumstances. For example, the 11-week remote preschool program produced statistically significant impacts on children’s literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills comparable to a year of in-person preschool programs in Lebanon. This finding opens doors to new ways of responding to the needs of children in the hardest-to-reach places and in times of acute crisis.
To respond to the crisis in Gaza, the IRC and Sesame Workshop are exploring new content to support children’s and caregivers’ mental health. Almost all children in Gaza require mental health and psychosocial support—a need that has doubled since before the recent escalation. With thousands injured and many more displaced by the conflict, it is critical to prioritize mental health support services for children to help them cope with the trauma and loss they are experiencing.
Key recommendations from the new report announced have timely relevance for donors, implementers, and policymakers in the ECD sector and far beyond:
- Dedicate focus to children and caregivers: Establish effective strategies to meaningfully engage affected communities. Establish or empower specific forums for assessing the comprehensive needs of children and caregivers—who are predominantly women—where related challenges and solutions can be discussed. This can be achieved by mandating interdisciplinary decision-making across education, health, nutrition, and protection policy and programming. Ensure that funds allocated will maximize the needs and voices of the most marginalized.
- Fund nimble solutions: Enable investment strategies that encourage prototyping, micro-pilots, and pivots. Structure funding investments around outcomes-driven approaches to be responsive to changing contexts and unforeseen opportunities. This means encouraging adaptive management practices and shoring up risk appetite for testing. Failure should be seen as a route to learning and iterating. Develop infrastructure and accountability to guide funding that puts the outcomes and the needs of people at the center rather than assumed solutions.
- Link funding, research, and data: Fund evidence generation to learn what works, for whom, and at what cost, linked to data-based needs. Allocate funding for evidence generation specifically in humanitarian settings. This requires increasing commitment to learning and research that leads to improved practice and policy. Invest in collecting and generating population data as well as monitoring and learning feedback across the lifecycle, disaggregated by gender, age, and ability.