An Example of the HDP Nexus Approach to Education Policy in Conflict and Displacement
This is a chapter in a forthcoming e-book, entitled 'The Triple Humanitarian, Development and Peace Nexus: In Context and Everyday Perspective', edited by Marina Ferrero Baselga and Rodrigo Mena. Chapters are currently being serialised on Global Policy.
In crisis-affected and fragile environments, the transition from humanitarian emergency response to post-crisis recovery and sustainable development is rarely linear. Long-term conflicts, cyclical violence, and protracted displacement are usually part of vicious circles that tend to repeat themselves. This complexity has led to the rise of the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus (HDPN) approach, also referred to as the ‘Triple Nexus’. Rather than treating humanitarian aid, development support, and peacebuilding interventions as separate sectors, supporters of the HDPN approach advocate to integrate them, enhancing resilience, addressing root causes of conflict, and creating sustainable pathways for recovery.
In the field of education, the need for this integrated approach is particularly evident. Providing schooling in emergencies or displacement settings cannot be limited to basic learning opportunities. The SDG4 Goal to provide Quality Education should not be forgotten by international donors and humanitarian actors if they want to demonstrate their seriousness in combatting the global learning crisis. The urgency around the global education and learning crisis has been remarked in 2022 at the UN Transforming Education Summit (TES), an extraordinary event, focused on putting at centre of the international agenda the importance of ‘equity, inclusion, quality and relevance in education’, and the ‘devastating impact that the current education and learning crisis is having on the futures of children and youth worldwide’. The TES also highlighted the importance of considering the multidimensionality of conflict-affected contexts in the global debate about education and the necessity to consider Triple Nexus actions in such contexts. Since then, only a few organizations have committed to applying the HDPN in education.
Too often, providing education during an ‘emergency’ becomes an excuse for donors, hosting governments, and humanitarian organizations to provide only basic ‘access’ to education, meant as temporary programs lacking critical quality elements, and making these programs far from reaching minimum quality education standards and to maintain unbalanced power relations.
This chapter explores the practical application of an HDPN approach in education programming as an alternative to emergency education. It draws on the author’s direct experience as a Team Leader at Plan International from 2018 to 2022, working in the Gambela Regional State of Ethiopia and the Puntland State of Somalia. The focus is on the EU-funded “BRiCE - Building Resilience: Education Opportunities in Fragile and Crisis-Affected Environments” program, examining how the HDPN can bring about high-quality education solutions even in conflict-affected and protracted displacement contexts.
The imperative of providing ‘quality education’ during emergencies and protracted displacement
Quality Education is a fundamental right that should not be suspended or ‘reduced’ during humanitarian crises. During conflicts or disasters, children are among the most affected and vulnerable individuals, and often those to suffer the most. In these situations, quality education opportunities can provide a sense of normalcy and protection, and learning can become a coping mechanism and a source of resilience.
This is the reason why, even in an emergency, quality education must pursue the integration with different key elements such as teachers’ professional development – since teaching should be always at the centre of any education policy and programming; child protection and school safeguarding policies – because schools must be safe environments; mental health and psychological support for children exposed to multiple traumas; gender equality and equity proactiveness to ensure that girls are receiving equal learning - and life - opportunities; context and cultural-sensitive policies and practices that build on local capacities, strengthen national institutions, and support communities’ social cohesion. These are some of the key elements to ensure quality.
Quality education is even more important for refugee children who live in refugee camps hosted in low-income countries, ‘fragile environments’ and conflict-affected contexts. These children often spend their entire childhood in those settings, and they come from, or live in regions affected by some of the longest crises in the world, countries such as South Sudan, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gaza, or Syria. In many of these cases, refugee children grow up knowing only a displaced life, and under these circumstances, education is often their only hope for a better future.
Despite these considerations, for many years, education was not integrated into standard humanitarian responses, and even now, most of the humanitarian education interventions are characterized by short-term duration and limited resources. Nowadays, the ‘Education in Emergencies’ (EiE) sector has become an integrated part of the standard humanitarian international operations, and this is to be considered an important success compared with the past when entire generations of children have been denied any kind of education during conflicts and disasters. However, despite the efforts of many individuals advocating for different approaches, EiE interventions are mainly tailored to focus on immediate access — such as setting up temporary learning spaces, organizing short term training for unqualified teachers, or providing limited teaching and learning materials, but rarely integrate comprehensive curricular development, structured teachers’ development, or robust quality learning standards. The crude reality is that emergency-driven approaches may ensure that children are not isolated, but they fail to ensure real learning outcomes. In other words, they may provide ‘quantity’ of schooling rather than the depth, relevance and long-lasting impact of quality education.
The Gambela context and the need for an HDPN approach in education for social cohesion
The case examined in this chapter is drawn from the Gambela Region of Ethiopia, which since 2014 has hosted almost 400,000 South Sudanese refugees. As a Team Leader for the project “Safe and Quality Education for Girls and Boys in Displacement Situations in Ethiopia and Somalia,” implemented under the above-mentioned BRiCE program, I observed firsthand how the HDPN approach could be successfully operationalized.
Gambela is a peripheral region of Ethiopia bordering South Sudan and characterized by an historical economic marginalization and recurrent conflict between local native ethnic groups, such as the Anuak (spelled also Anywaa) and Nuer, as well as between these communities and other Ethiopian communities – so called “highlanders” because migrated - or deported, from other parts of the country, the highlands. Since 2014, this complex environment has been further complicated by the presence of a large number of South Sudanese refugees which are predominantly Nuer. The refugee presence intensifies competition over resources and public services, challenging the fragile equilibrium of the region. For the Anuak community, the steady refugee influx alters local demographics and raises fears about their ethnic and political marginalization. However, this is not the first time there has been a major influx of refugees from South Sudan to Gambela – or from the same bordering regions which prior 2011 belonged to Sudan. Indeed, it happened already during the Sixties and the Nineties of the last century, and even at that time, refugees stayed for decades, and some never left. In addition to this, Gambela is part of the wider context of Ethiopia, already listed as one of the least developed countries, and considered a ‘fragile’ and conflict-affected context, where the last major national conflict has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands people in 2020-2021 during the war in the northern regions of the country.
In regions like Gambela, displacement and conflict become intertwined in complex ways. Inherited communal tensions and competition for resources between host communities and refugees create an extremely difficult context in which to operate refugee education programming. When a refugee crisis starts, refugees have humanitarian needs more urgent than education, while host communities already struggle with their own historical grievances, precarious livelihoods, and infrastructural deficits. In these situations, existing education systems are already overstretched, struggling to provide the most basic services, while education should include robust resilience and conflict-sensitive elements in this education programming.
Navigating this complexity can be exhausting and, at the same time, incredibly gratifying. Under the BRiCE project, core activities included building new schools in the host communities – given the total lack of decent infrastructures; providing long-term professional qualification of refugee teachers – given that the 90% of these teachers were unqualified; supporting female teachers and promoting girls education initiatives; training school managers and government education officials; reinforcing the education management information system (EMIS) of the region; developing the new regional school safeguarding policy, and related code of conduct, to be used in all the schools of the region; and fostering peaceful coexistence through ad hoc activities. This holistic approach extended beyond immediate, crisis-driven solutions and moved toward developing solid education systems with more qualified teachers, well-managed schools, and government departments capable of effectively overseeing service delivery.
By focusing on institutional strengthening, the project sought to ensure sustainability and resilience in the education sector. Rather than delivering education as a one-off humanitarian action, the program worked closely with local authorities, teachers, and helped to harmonize approaches between host and refugee communities. This long-term perspective, guided by HDPN principles, acknowledges that simply providing access to basic schooling is insufficient. Instead, building local capacities, improving governance, and fostering a sense of ownership over education services can create a lasting impact.
Furthermore, going beyond the transition from humanitarian to development education (so called double nexus), the project added a specific conflict sensitive activity, the ‘community dialogues’, designed to support peaceful coexistence. These ‘dialogues’ were periodic assemblies gathering community and religious leaders, as well as teachers, school managers, and government officials from the different communities, and were designed to give them the chance to openly discuss sensitive challenges affecting the community. These opportunities gave the education program the chance to transcend its humanitarian function, evolving into a possible foundation for reconciliation and social cohesion.
Finally, it is important to notice that the initial 4-year duration of the project, extended later an additional 10 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to some periods of armed conflict, as well as the adaptiveness of the Plan International implementing teams and the donor’s flexibility, EC DG INTPA education team in Brussels, were instrumental in achieving meaningful results.
Conclusion
Over the past years, even the main global actors in education – like UNESCO and INEE - have committed to include HDPN in education in emergencies. However, moving from a purely humanitarian approach to a more development-oriented model of education provision in which also the peacebuilding element is also considered is far from achieved. This involves flexibility, adaptability, and at the same time, long-term vision into education policies and programs for protracted crises and displacement. Structured teachers’ professional development, institutional strengthening, culturally sensitive curricula, and gender and inclusive policies need to be critical pillars of a longer-term strategy. By intertwining these elements into educational programming, hosting governments and the international community can transform emergency learning interventions into pathways for community resilience, growth, and stability. In such a model, education does not merely survive conflict and displacement — it becomes part of an overall strategy to overcome them, paving the road for development and, ultimately, peaceful coexistence.
Disclaimer: I offer the following disclaimer to acknowledge and pre-empt any feeling that my arguments may be unfair to those working in education in emergencies or in the broader humanitarian sector. Due to the limited space available for this publication, I cannot fully address every challenge, constraint, or nuance inherent in humanitarian policy and its politics. However, I recognize that some of my statements may appear “trenchant.” Please, know that this is in no way a dismissal of the continuous and invaluable efforts of countless colleagues around the world — particularly those working directly in the field in conflict-affected contexts — who strive every day to go beyond reasonable expectations, often at great personal risk, to help the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Massimo Alone is a humanitarian and development practitioner and researcher with over 25 years of experience working with displaced populations and other vulnerable communities in conflict-affected contexts. Over the past two decades, he has led multi-sector, multi-year programs across the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Since 2021, he has been pursuing doctoral studies at the Centre for International Education (CIE) at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on refugee education policy in conflict-affected settings and protracted displacement, with a case study centred on South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia's Gambella region. Massimo’s career includes conducting research and analyses for various organizations and publishing academic articles and book chapters on conflict in Sudan (2004, 2005) and politics in Palestine (2006, 2014). In February 2020, he founded the Humanitarian Development Peace (HDP) Nexus, or Triple Nexus group on LinkedIn, a platform that now hosts over 850 experts, advisors, and researchers. This group represents the largest international community of practice dedicated to advancing the HDP Nexus in diverse contexts. Link: Humanitarian Development Peace (HDP) Nexus, or Triple Nexus | LinkedIn Groups
Photo by Kelly
