Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the global fund launched at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to deliver quality education for vulnerable children and youth in countries affected by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and protracted crises – selected Afghanistan as one of the first countries to roll out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP). The in-country Steering Committee formed to oversee implementation of the programme appointed management of the MYRP to UNICEF as a grantee. Afghanistan’s MYRP was designed to focus on ‘out of school children’, by setting up community-based education (CBE) classes close to where they live. 

To help address the education crisis, ECW works with a wide range of partners through an extended and expanded Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP) which covers 14 provinces. Specifically, ECW works to expand access to non-formal education, especially for adolescent girls; promote continuity in learning by facilitating the transition to hub schools; support teacher training; improve monitoring systems; and establish child protection and safeguarding measures in communities. ECW’s support also focuses on ensuring access to mental health and psychosocial services and the physical well-being of children, with a particular focus on children with disabilities.

Programme Components

• Sustainably expand girls’ access to education, both by further scaling up community-based education in remote and underserved areas and by rolling out accelerated learning programmes for adolescent girls who are unable to access the formal education system
• Improve holistic learning outcomes through inclusive, gender-responsive teaching and learning approaches
• Build a strengthened and more resilient education sector, including by recruiting more female teachers and by providing them with tailored capacity development support
• Mobilize sufficient resources to further scale up provision of non-formal education