SPaN (2019) Operational Note 6: Health and Education

Traditionally, humanitarian assistance has been focused on short-term response to save lives and address acute needs of crisis-affected populations. With humanitarian crises becoming increasingly complex, recurrent and protracted, and often compounding pre-existing high levels of poverty and vulnerability, a critical need for longer-term solutions has emerged. Health is a key focus of humanitarian assistance and also a metric of humanitarian response. However, humanitarian assistance focusing on health is rapidly changing as the burden shifts towards chronic non-communicable diseases and growing urban refugee populations. 

Education is also one of the main pillars of humanitarian response, but the sector suffers from a significant funding mismatch, with only six per cent of the total humanitarian budget going to educational programmes. The 2018 General Guidelines of the European Commission on Operational Priorities for Humanitarian Aid identify the scaling-up of social protection systems through investments in health, education and overall poverty reduction as one of the core avenues to enhance the long-term resilience of vulnerable populations and to enable rapid and efficient assistance in response to shocks.

This global policy shift has also been spurred by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): by explicitly recognising that many of the drivers of humanitarian emergencies can significantly reverse the progress in education, health and other development outcomes of the last decades, the 2030 Agenda sets out a vision for social protection, focusing particularly on vulnerable populations such as those exposed to humanitarian settings, so that ‘no one is left behind’ in the achievement of SDG 3 (Health) and SDG 4 (Education). 

This note builds on the main SPaN Reference Document to illustrate the state of play of health and education in humanitarian settings, by providing: (i) an overview of the role of social protection for addressing educational and health needs (in both humanitarian and development settings); and, (ii) a review of evidence, promising instruments, tools and best practices on the implementation of social protection programmes in emergencies for health and education. The definition of social protection is broad and often subject to debate, particularly in the humanitarian-development nexus. In this note, we focus on the non-contributory social protection transfers that are most commonly employed in humanitarian and fragile settings.

Acknowledgement

This operational note has been written by Elisabetta Aurino and Sara Guinti and further benefited from contributions by thematic experts of DG DEVCO and DG ECHO and their advisory services. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.

This note is part of a Supplementary Volume of the European Commission´s Reference Document N.26: Social Protection across the Humanitarian Development Nexus: A Game Changer in Supporting People Through Crises. A full list of resources from the EU ‘Guidance Package on Social Protection across the Humanitarian-Development Nexus’ (SPaN) is available here. 

The Guidance Package initiative is jointly led by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DEVCO), Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (NEAR) with the support of DEVCO Unit 04 and the MKS programme.