Article
No Lost Generation: Cash transfers for displaced Syrian children in Lebanon
Imagine you
work for UNICEF in Lebanon. Your team has the challenging task of ensuring that
half a million displaced Syrian children who fled the war in their home country
attend primary school. These children live scattered throughout the country, as
Lebanon has a “no-camps” policy. Many of them are traumatized and grow up in
bitter poverty. You have collaborated with the Lebanese Ministry of Education
to open a free afternoon shift in public primary schools, specifically for
Syrian children. You have also helped to set up an accelerated learning program
that enables Syrian children who have been out of school for many years to enter
school at an age appropriate grade. Yet, despite these considerable
achievements, approximately half of the Syrian children you are trying to
support do not attend school.This was the
situation facing the UNICEF Lebanon team at the end of 2015. Survey data
suggested that poverty was a key remaining barrier to school attendance of
Syrian children. Although afternoon shift schools do not charge fees, many
households could not afford the residual costs of school participation including
transport to school. Moreover, many households relied on child labor to
supplement household income, limiting children’s time available for school. As
a direct solution, UNICEF Lebanon considered compensating households for the
cost of education and lost income by means of a monthly cash payment when
children enroll in an afternoon shift school. In collaboration with the
Ministry of Education and the World Food Programme, UNICEF Lebanon set up a
pilot program – referred to as the No Lost Generation Program or locally as Min
Ila - to test this approach in the 2016/2017 schoolyear. So-called cash
transfer programs, such as the one considered by UNICEF Lebanon, are used on a
large scale in other settings and with considerable success. They tend to
increase children’s school participation (see here,
here,
and here)
and lower children’s participation in work (see here) among a
host of other beneficial impacts. However, it is not clear that these programs would
have comparable effects in contexts of displacement and humanitarian emergency
(see here
for a discussion of the limited available rigorous evidence in these settings).
In the case of Lebanon, would Syrian households really use the financial
support to pay for children’s school attendance, or do they have other
priorities? Would they, for instance, use the money to pay off debt or purchase
food and shelter? Is money really a promising tool to support the school
attendance of potentially traumatized children? Could there be other barriers
to school participation not previously considered? The UNICEF
Lebanon team decided to seek a thorough answer to these questions, both to
decide whether to scale up the pilot program and to inform broader debates around
the right approach to ensuring school participation in settings of displacement.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this decision. Generating credible
evidence in a setting such as the one described in this blog is not as easy as
it may sound and requires a significant investment both in terms of staff time
and financial resources. Given the extensive demands to deliver services to a
population in need, evidence generation (beyond direct monitoring and
evaluation of program delivery) understandably ranks low on the list of
priorities in settings of displacement. However, it is critical to learn from
experiences in the field if we are to support displaced populations effectively
and allocate resources efficiently in future refugee crises.The study
findings (soon to be available in the UNICEF Innocenti catalogue) highlight
both the potential and the limitations of cash transfers as a tool in settings
of massive displacement. Among children
enrolled in afternoon shift schools, the study shows an increase in household
expenditure on education and transport to school in particular. Because
afternoon shift schools close at nightfall during at least part of the school
year, safe transport is considered a critical element of regular school
attendance. Accordingly, the study finds a positive impact on school attendance
of children enrolled in afternoon shift schools. Weekly days of school
attendance increased by about 20 percent (or 0.6 days) due to the program. This
increase is comparable for younger children and older children and comparable
for boys and girls. There is no
evidence that the pilot program increased afternoon shift school enrollment in
study areas. This could be due to a combination of factors. Most importantly, primary
school enrollment rates (including but not limited to afternoon shift school
enrollment rates) of Syrian children increased rapidly across the country
during the period of the study. An intensive “back to school” advocacy campaign
is presumed to have played an important role in this increase in primary school
enrollment. The increase in primary school enrollment appears to have led to
capacity constraints, limiting the opportunity for out of school children to
enroll in an afternoon shift school even if they had wanted to.The UNICEF
Lebanon team has used these findings to advocate for expanded capacity to
absorb Syrian children in Lebanese schools. A new wave of follow-up data was
recently collected. The aim is to measure broader impacts of the cash support
on outcomes such as children’s mental health, their self-esteem, outlook on
life and aspirations. Stay tuned and
follow UNICEF Innocenti for the latest results when they come out.