Think Creative Spring 2024

Using art to overcome trauma in Northern Ethiopia

READ II Education Recovery Activity

Ethiopia sports & recreation support to schools

unique way,” Zewdie says. “If one location is inaccessible, the next day we will decide to go to a different location that is accessible and in high need. We have to divert those schedules to other locations and mobilize other locations in order not to waste time.” Staff in Tigray faced danger as the fighting continued and had to cope with disruptions in banking, phone service and fuel supply. After the government and insurgent Tigray forces signed a peace agreement in November 2022, READ II planned to train teachers and school directors in the three regions simul taneously in late 2023. But clashes resumed in Amhara in mid-2023, making that region unsafe to work in. So READ II reacted by focusing its resources on training in the other two regions on an accelerated schedule. When they finished in those regions, security had improved in Amha ra, so they quickly did all that region’s training. Pivoting will become the new normal given destabilizing trends such as global warming, project leaders predict. “The work will have more and more crisis- related elements,” Bostock says. “Organizations like Creative that are known for responding flexibly and quickly to crises will have a competitive advantage.” Zewdie advises implementers to expect the un predictable and plan for it. “Anyone developing a project foreseeing any future conflict needs to make sure that flexibility is built into the de sign, so that the design will allow you to change aspects of the project, even major aspects.” n Habtamu Woldeyohannes and Betelhem Tesfaye contributed reporting.

READ II Education Recovery Activity

And the Ethiopia team had already faced a crisis. Just months after the project’s launch in 2018, drought-fueled conflict displaced a million people in Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali regions, closing schools for weeks. The READ II literacy project had been de signed with a crisis modifier setting aside a portion of its budget in case of crisis. USAID activated that contingency. READ II rapidly delivered educational materials to IDP camps and trained teachers and school directors to provide psychosocial support in collaboration with regional education bureaus. That experience proved valuable when the Tigray crisis erupted. “That became the core of our training mate rials for education in emergencies,” says Guy Bostock, the program’s Deputy Chief of Party. “What we had learned about the supply chain, procuring and transporting large amounts of school materials, we were then able to scale that up.” Another asset was the advice of humanitarian actors with long experience in the region, in cluding World Vision and International Rescue Committee, both partners on the original itera tion of the project, as well as UNICEF.

Students at the Addis Fana Primary School in Dessie display their artwork as part of a district-wide contest.

Adapting to the unpredictable The experience also demonstrated how work ing in conflict situations requires implement ers to be agile. The team would often prepare for an activity in one village only to learn days before that the security situation had wors ened. “The work environment was changing in a

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