What is humanitarian education and does it help build peace?

By Chloe Bruce

Second of three parts

On the other hand, the EiE practitioners insist that this education saves lives. In a working paper, Christopher Talbot, who was a co-founder of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies, argues that “it also sustains life by giving children a sense of the restoration of normality, familiar routine and hope for the future, all of which are vital for mitigating the psychosocial impact of violence and displacement for individuals and whole communities.” Accessing education and reestablishing safe routines can therefore vastly reduce human suffering at a time when children are especially vulnerable to situations resulting in child marriage, child labor, and recruitment into groups supporting violence. Yona Nestel, a senior education adviser at Plan International Canada, writes that “Education in emergencies is often a humanitarian afterthought, even though it has been demonstrated as the most effective way to normalize children’s lives and help them recover from trauma.”

Talbot also states that being enrolled in education can help children avoid danger: “Children and adolescents who are not in school are at greater risk of violent attack and rape, and of recruitment into fighting forces, prostitution and life-threatening, often criminal activities.” He also claims that education initiatives can help restore peace in conflict situations and disaster-affected societies by preparing for reconstruction and developing economically and socially valuable skills.

In his 2011 article on EiE Best Practice, Phillip Price points to examples of learning about landmine awareness and sexual health, and how these lessons reduce death and injury later on in life. This highlights the other, arguably more important, side of humanitarian education initiatives: the content of education. Despite EFA and EiE’s focus on expanding access to education, humanitarian organizations often do more than just build capacity to educate; they deliver their own bespoke education curricula aimed at reducing human suffering and building more peaceful societies.

Restoring access to education is only one part of humanitarian education. Once children and communities return to classrooms or other learning spaces, humanitarian organizations face another question: What should be taught? Beyond literacy and numeracy, many organizations have concluded that education in crisis settings should also help learners cope with trauma, rebuild trust, resolve conflict, and strengthen social cohesion. This has led humanitarian organizations to develop specialized educational programs that draw on peace education and other learner-centered pedagogies.

Shaping Peace Education

Humanitarian organizations generally pursue these broader educational goals through three complementary approaches: training new humanitarian practitioners, teaching humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law, and adapting peace education through established learner-centered pedagogies.

Humanitarian organizations and educational institutions teach how to do humanitarian work. This includes learning a variety of practical skills, such as international law, frameworks, project management, and logistics, while instilling humanitarian values like accountability, trust, and fairness. A substantial amount of this learning takes place online, so it is accessible to a wide range of practitioners worldwide. Evaluations of some of these courses, including a humanitarian leadership diploma for practitioners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and a course run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Italy, found them effective at building humanitarian knowledge and capacity among participants.

The extent to which such capacity building leads to peace in the region has not been clearly assessed. But it is considered better for the sustainability of humanitarian work among local populations. Scholar Séverine Autesserre has written several books highlighting the importance of localization in humanitarian work and its relationship to genuine, long-lasting peace.

A key part of the curriculum for these courses focuses on developing an understanding of humanitarian principles. They teach external practitioners and staff members to internalize values such as egalitarianism, respect, and empathy through practical skills like active listening and problem-solving. These skills are also taught to younger people through educational programs, such as the Youth as Agents of Behavioral Change (YABC) offered by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). This program aims to teach young people “critical thinking, dropping bias, collaborative negotiation, mediation, and enhancing personal resilience,” along with other practical skills similar to those taught to humanitarian practitioners. This has led to the establishment of the final pillar of humanitarian education: teaching peace to the general population. Organizations use “peace education” pedagogy, combined with their experience teaching humanitarian skills and values, to develop learners’ willingness and instill the ability to be peaceful.

Peace education developed alongside alternative educational theories in the 20th century. While Montessori and other educational approaches promote education that centers on the needs of the learner, peace education focuses on the needs of peacebuilding. As Yi Yu and Michael Wyness explain in their journal Social Sciences, “Across socio-political contexts, peace education may target micro-level interpersonal skills, such as conflict resolution, or macro-level societal change, including altering collective narratives, breaking down stereotypes, and promoting human rights.”

Rather than representing a single distinct pedagogy, humanitarian education combines multiple leading learning theories to refine peace education into approaches that help rebuild societies after conflict and disaster. It combines aspects of psychosocial competencies and social-emotional learning (SEL) pedagogy to develop learners’ self-esteem and psychological resilience. Humanitarian education inculcates these pedagogies, believing that establishing a strong sense of self, combined with a deep understanding of emotions, is vital to building empathy and healthy coping mechanisms in the face of extreme stress.

It also seeks to teach people how to manage the trauma they’ve experienced, which is often a source of perpetuating conflict. It draws on other pedagogies, such as intercultural learning, to build the capacity to understand opposing views, aiming to bridge political or ideological differences between groups.

Does Humanitarian Education Work?

The YABC program has been implemented in several countries since its release in 2008. Still, aside from qualitative accounts of how the learning personally impacted some participants, there has been little evaluation of its impact on the development of peaceful societies. Beyond this program, the IFRC has developed educational programs aimed at teaching international humanitarian law since the early 2000s, with other organizations such as the British Red Cross and the Canadian Red Cross. According to testimonies in a 2025 blog post, IHL education helped develop empathy and understanding among students, especially toward people from refugee backgrounds. However, to really understand if humanitarian education is effective in building peace, these initiatives need to be thoroughly assessed.

Save the Children ran a program in Syria in 2022 called “The Summer Club,” which was structured as a “12-session child resilience program for… 200 children. The child resilience program included activities in problem-solving, improving knowledge of the self, healthy expression of feelings, effective communication, and identifying and dealing with abuse and bullying.” This program was likely modeled after Save the Children’s longstanding Youth Resilience Program. In investigating the efficacy of this project, Save the Children found high engagement in the program, with “99 percent attending more than 70 percent of all activities. Facilitators’ observations also noted that the children were deeply engaged during the sessions.” They also analyzed how far learning goals were achieved, stating that “100 percent out of the 65 percent of targeted children had better awareness of child protection threats and skills to deal with them, when comparing pre-test to post-test at the end of Summer Club.”

They also conducted third-party monitoring to determine that “Summer Club had increased their ability to understand school subjects and that their performance at school had improved from participating in Summer Club.” This program was initiated by Save the Children Denmark in collaboration with a local partner. According to them, while the local partner was heavily involved and provided continuous feedback, there is little information available on long-term outcomes or the program’s sustainability. A wider evaluation of how the education of these 200 children impacted broader peace in the region was not conducted.

We can compare this small program to a larger group of IRC initiatives in the same region. The “Ahlan Simsim” project has reached “over 1.3 million children and caregivers with direct services for families across Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.” It involves a structured 12-week intervention in which children watch an Arabic-language version of Sesame Street to learn social-emotional skills and improve literacy and numeracy. The show was called Ahlan Simsim or “Welcome Sesame” in Arabic. According to the IRC, their study “found that watching the Ahlan Simsim show had a significant impact on children’s foundational social-emotional skills, such as identifying emotions and applying coping strategies.”

They also broadcast the television show across the MENA region, reaching another 23 million children. IRC claims that “Watching Ahlan Simsim helps children identify emotions of fear and frustration and teaches them coping strategies, like pausing to breathe in emotionally stressful situations. … [N]ew characters join familiar faces like Elmo and Cookie Monster to teach children important lessons and promote healthy early childhood development. These new characters are designed to be relatable to children living in vulnerable situations.”

Chloe Bruce is a nonprofit communications specialist and project manager who has worked and volunteered with humanitarian organizations in the UK, Australia, Colombia, China, and Canada. She studied English and history at the University of Edinburgh before earning a master’s degree in leadership and international development from King’s College London. She also holds an advanced diploma in humanitarian education from the University of Teacher Education Zug. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.