Building resilience and promoting recovery through education in conflict-affected South Sudan

• In Event: Reflections on resilience-focussed approaches within education programming

Proposal

South Sudan is a resilience focus country for USAID, which means that as a mission it strives to sequence, layer, and plan programming in a way that builds resilience to recurrent and protracted crises, advances progress on the Journey to Self-Reliance, and contributes to a range of development outcomes, including education. Education programs ensure children in South Sudan learn in a safe and protected environment that takes into account their need for psychosocial support and development of life skills as well as disaster risk reduction, prevention and response to gender-based violence and peacebuilding. Simultaneously in South Sudan, there is a multi-stakeholder Partnership for Recovery and Resilience (PfRR) that targets seven geographic areas of South Sudan and applies a partner-driven approach to collaborate, co-locate, and coordinate programming around four pillar areas, including re-establishing access to basic services. USAID South Sudan will discuss its programmatic successes and challenges, present data from recent research on absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience capacities specifically in education in South Sudan, and provide practical examples of how education contributes to multi-sectoral outcomes, in particular highlighting how education programming has helped to build children’s resilience by providing a stable learning environment and reducing effects of chronic disruption of learning and vulnerability to risks with an integrated approach incorporating education, child protection, prevention of gender-based violence, communication for development, water, sanitation and hygiene support services.

Author

• Wendy Wheaton, US Agency for International Development (USAID)