For too long, the world has had a blind spot for the extraordinary and growing number of children denied education because they had the bad fortune to live in countries affected by conflict, acute health emergencies or devastating natural disasters.

That’s why the new Education Cannot Wait Fund, which was unveiled today at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, is such a welcome addition to the global education toolbox.

Education Cannot Wait is a central effort to heighten the political commitment from countries and institutions around the world to support education in crises, raise and allocate new funding and enhance the capacity and accountability of countries facing crisis.

Education Cannot Wait is a long overdue response to a mammoth global challenge, which has also become an increasingly big part of the work of the Global Partnership for Education.

According to the Overseas Development Institute, an estimated 75 million children between the age of 3 and 18, in 35 crisis-affected countries, need significant educational support. Disruptions in their intellectual, cognitive and social development will almost certainly consign these children and their families to lives of poverty, major health problems and powerlessness.

Without schools, children are deprived of places of relative stability, security and normality. Moreover, girls living in humanitarian crises are two-and-a-half times more likely to be out of school than those in non-crisis environments.

An absence of urgency

Their plight has been well known for years. And yet, the urgency to address it has long been lacking. Most global responses to humanitarian crises don’t prioritize keeping children in school as they do other essential human services, and less than 2% of humanitarian aid goes to education.

Much of the meager, unpredictable funding for education in crisis contexts comes through short-term, humanitarian appeals. Given that, on average, conflicts in low-income countries last about 12 years and displacement due to conflict or protracted crises continues for 17 years, there’s a clear need for more sustainable and reliable funding.

Complementing GPE’s mission and structure

For more than a year, GPE has worked closely with UN agencies and other leading global education partners to create Education Cannot Wait. The ambition is to build on and improve current support structures for crisis situations. It complements GPE’s own mission, GPE’s 2016 to 2020 strategic plan, which aligns with the ambitious new global goals to educate all the world’s children by 2030, and deepens the commitment to supporting education in countries facing crisis. That growing emphasis has been underway for some time. GPE funding for education in crisis has gone from 21% of overall GPE funding in 2008 to about 50% by 2015.

Our new, just issued, policy brief, GPE’s Work in Fragile and Conflict-affected Countries, provides a good overview of our work in this space. The guidelines to develop transitional education plans developed together with INEE and with input from many other partners, are another important operational support for countries and development partners during times of crisis.

In Chad, for example, a GPE-funded emergency program has enabled the government to shore up an already over-burdened school system to serve thousands of refugee children who have fled violence in neighboring countries.

In South Sudan, which has been torn apart by civil war, partners like GPE have helped the government create and execute a plan to improve the national education system, assist schools in improving their performance, offer models for school strengthening and enable more girls to receive an education.

Education Cannot Wait will also draw on GPE’s collaborative partnership model to improve coordination of education crisis planning and responses among all affected governments, relevant domestic stakeholders and external development, humanitarian and civil society partners.

As GPE has shown since it began in 2002, harmonizing the funding and actions of education partners amplifies impact and minimizes the potential for interventions to work at cross purposes or duplicate effort.

Important first steps

Education Cannot Wait has set a very ambitious funding goal of US$3.85 billion for the next five years. It is good to see that Dubai Cares, the European Commission, the Global Business Coalition for Education, and the governments of the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the USA have already made financial commitments totaling US$190 million. They offer a strong example to donors to make similar commitments later in the year.

We are grateful to UNICEF for taking on the task as temporary host and administrator of Education Cannot Wait. GPE will support UNICEF and the new secretariat wholeheartedly.

Similarly, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, UNICEF’s Executive Director Anthony Lake and GPE Board Chair Julia Gillard should be congratulated and thanked for their tireless leadership: without them we would be waiting a very long time for Education Cannot Wait.

The governments of the United Kingdom and Canada also deserve the global community’s thanks for their co-leadership of the Technical Strategy Group over the past year.

As the name of the new fund suggests, there is an urgency for the world to embrace the goals of Education Cannot Wait. Children most often have just one chance to get the quality learning they need to tap their full potential. Education Cannot Wait will bring long overdue momentum to give hopefully all of them that opportunity.  Let’s make sure this noble enterprise gets full and continued support.