Supporting the Educators at the Center of a Crisis
Humanitarian education understandably places displaced students at the center of its efforts. However, an INEE study published in 2026 draws attention to another group whose needs are often overlooked: the refugee educators responsible for supporting those students. Researchers studied eight primary schools in refugee villages in northern Pakistan and found severe limitations. Only three of the eight schools had access to water considered safe to drink, roughly one-third had functioning toilets, and class sizes ranged from 30 to 100 students. In some schools, dropout rates reached 30 percent.
The teachers were also living with uncertainty. Afghan educators described unstable employment, repeated displacement, exhaustion, and a persistent sense of not knowing where they belonged. These pressures affected not only their personal well-being but also their ability to support students facing similar experiences.
Rather than applying a standardized training programme, the researchers began by listening to the teachers. Their accounts shaped a revised professional-development course focused on care, belonging, inclusion, teacher well-being, and student mental health. This approach recognized teachers as people affected by displacement, not simply as workers expected to help others cope with it.
The study highlights a weakness in some humanitarian education programmes: they expect teachers to provide stability without ensuring that those teachers have adequate support themselves. A programme developed elsewhere may offer useful ideas, but it cannot simply be transferred into a crisis setting without considering local conditions, resources, and priorities.
This lesson also applies to youth-led initiatives such as Megaphone. Responsible educational work begins with listening to the people already living and working within a community. Our role should not be to arrive with a ready-made answer, but to build alongside local educators and students, using their experiences to determine what support would actually be useful.
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