Opinion: Beyond just programming: data as an instrument of power and activism

While data is essential for identifying needs and tracking progress, there is a tendency in the context of education in emergencies, or EIE, to focus the discussion on data gaps on the operational aspect of education, i.e., what data is lacking to improve programming and provisions. While such data is doubtlessly essential, it does not engage with the broader aims and purposes of collecting data or education. Instead, we should be:

1. Going beyond operational data.

EIE has become a widely used term when talking about education in the context of crises. Despite this proliferation, EIE remains a poorly conceptualized and researched field, thus requiring further evidence that can engage with epistemological as well as operational matters.

One of the unexplored questions in EIE is related to the purpose of schooling in a humanitarian context. Education is a long-term and future-oriented endeavor, while humanitarianism is short-term and focused on the immediate. As a result, education policy and responses in EIE tend to be short-term and often overlook pre-existing inequalities and fall short of addressing the structural barriers that might affect enrolment and retention amongst children.

This is accompanied by a tendency in the EIE discourse to treat education as an unmitigated good regardless of the structural barriers.

However, the available data tells us a different story. Most refugee children drop out in the primary stage of their schooling and continue to live in poverty and precarity while experiencing many barriers that prohibit their participation in society. The type of challenges and obstacles in EIE are thus not only about operations and programming, but are related to how we conceive the role of schooling in shaping children’s future.

In addition to asking how we can increase access to schools, we need to ask what kind of education can equip young people in a context of emergency with the skills, knowledge, and power to challenge and overcome existing barriers and inequalities.

2. Engaging with questions of power and structure.

Addressing data gaps in EIE is often discussed as a procedural issue. This is not helped by the fact that being embedded in a humanitarian logic, EIE adopts an apolitical approach to education. However, in a nation-state context, education is a political and power-laden process.

The humanitarian field has been long criticized for the power tensions between humanitarian agencies, the state, and the concerned population. By opting to restrict our data to programming issues, we are choosing to overlook the power dynamics that shape EIE. These structures can play a critical role in including and excluding certain groups and determining educational policies, practices, and provisions. Which parties get a more significant say or are excluded? How do these power dynamics maintain colonial legacies? On what basis and evidence are these education policy decisions based? What data exists, who has access to it, and how is it shared and used? How are the cost of response plans, and on what basis? Answering these questions requires data that is ready to interrogate the powerful and hold them accountable.

3. Producing data for accountability.

Perhaps one of the most critical data gaps in the field of EIE is data focused on accountability and integrity of education responses in humanitarian crises. While investment in EIE has increased over the past 20 years, there is still a lack of data on the accountability and transparency of emergency responses.

While some INGOs and humanitarian agencies conduct the internal evaluations stipulated in their bylaws, data generated from these tends to remain confidential. As a researcher in this field, I refrain from doing more consultancy research for these agencies due to the limitations imposed on sharing the findings.

Research bodies and agencies that can produce such data are also difficult to find and, if existing, suffer from shortages of funding and support. Their role in supporting efforts to improve education attainment have been thus far ignored by most concerned parties, which leads us to my next point on who will collect this data.

The who and how

Another vital question is how and who will be collecting, owning, funding, disseminating, and using this data — prompting another question about the research capacities in the context of EIE.

The field of knowledge production in forced migration and EIE has a long history with colonial practices manifested in the hegemony of the global north on publications, authorship, and research grants. The rise of postcolonial studies in the past few decades have challenged the way research and knowledge production on and in the global south takes place, especially by scholars in the global north. Researchers in the global south are often reduced to data collectors, while academics or organizations in the global north use and publish the data.

Any attempt to improve data in this field has to deal with the legacy of colonialism and requires investing in research institutions — governmental and independent, academic, and non-academic — in the countries where EIE is taking place. This is critical for developing local and relevant research agendas which can stimulate discussion and knowledge production in the field.

By investing, I mean supporting funding and strengthening higher education institutions to build research programs, access academic journals, promote spaces for intellectual freedom, and debate, publication, translation, and interpretation. It also requires adapting research ethics that respond to the local needs and contexts in the global south rather than protecting institutions in the global north.

Filling data gaps is essential, but more important and sustainable is creating an environment where local researchers and organizations can identify their research gaps and needs. The ethics of sharing data is vital in collecting research evidence.

Supporting spaces for dialogue and debate amongst policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and other actors are essential for utilizing this data and deploying it to understand the current challenges, successes, and needs. The languages and means of disseminating this data can restrict the kind of debate and knowledge in the EIE context.

Not only is it important to make this data available to other researchers and educators, but also to the wider public by supporting alternative platforms for publication, dissemination, and dialogue is key for promoting education.

Data is a powerful tool for improving access to quality education, particularly for women. However, we can only realize the potential role data has if we deploy it to understand the structural, relational, and practical aspects of the EIE system. Only then can data become an instrument of power, scholarship, and change.