Addressing Barriers to Education

This project aims to support a range of countries experiencing fragility conflict and violence to improve the quality and gender-responsiveness of their education systems and better address the health-related barriers that impede girls’ and adolescent girls’ access to quality education and learning including for those with disabilities. This project is implemented by the World Bank in collaboration with the Global Financing Facility (GFF). The GFF is a multi-donor financing platform that provides country-led sustainable financing for health nutrition and education. Addressing education and learning challenges in countries facing fragility conflict and violence requires building on the inherent linkages between education and health. Access to school quality instruction and learning materials are necessary but insufficient to achieve good learning outcomes. Children and adolescents need to be healthy to take full advantage of the education opportunities provided and education is a key determinant of health outcomes. As a result of poor health children miss an estimated 500 million days of school in low- and lower-middle income countries each year. This project supports GFF countries affected by fragility conflict and violence to improve education outcomes for girls and adolescent girls by: 1. Reducing health-related barriers that impede access for girls to education: Efforts to reduce barriers focus on scaling up the delivery of health programs in schools that target girls and adolescent girls with a package of health and nutrition services that have been demonstrated to reduce health-related barriers to education and improve enrollment attendance and retention. Health interventions include for example school-based malaria prevention feeding/micronutrient supplementation vaccinations deworming vision screening and comprehensive sexuality education. These efforts can improve child and adult survival reduce early and mistimed pregnancy reduce chi

The expected outcomes for this project include: (1) increased equitable access to safe secure quality inclusive education and learning by girls adolescent girls and women including those with disabilities in crisis- and conflict-affected and fragile situations and humanitarian settings; and (2) improved equitable and coordinated provision of innovative safe quality gender-responsive and evidence-based formal and non-formal education from early childhood to the end of secondary for girls adolescent girls and women including those with disabilities in crisis- and conflict-affected and fragile situations and humanitarian settings.