How Do You Teach Kids in a War Zone?

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How Do You Teach Kids in a War Zone?

An award-winning edtech team explains how to support teachers in a crisis.

Can technology really help students learn? Founders have tried to apply new technologies to scale the teaching process—$100 laptops, massive open online courses, and AI-generated coursework—only to fall short of lofty ambitions to make education institutions obsolete.

Yet the director of a design team that works in perhaps the world’s toughest teaching environment— war zones—argues there’s nothing “special” about edtech.

“It’s time on task and good learning content and a decent pedagogy. It’s not magic,” argued Luke Stannard, program director at the War Child Alliance’s “Can’t Wait to Learn” initiative, in an interview with Fortune.

The “Can’t Wait to Learn” project is an education technology initiative from the War Child Alliance, an NGO that provides teaching resources in conflict zones like Ukraine and Lebanon. It also received this year’s Yidan Prize, a yearly award for education.

“Edtech is a big baggy monster of a phrase,” Stannard said. “There’s a lot of snake oil in education technology, and we should push back against that.”

WAR CHILD ALLIANCE

War Child Alliance was founded in 1993 after Dutch social entrepreneur Willemijn Verloop and British filmmakers David Wilson and Bill Leeson visited Yugoslavia during the Bosnian

War. Grassroots efforts by those on the ground to provide education, like musical workshops held in bomb shelters, inspired the three to raise money for workshops and education initiatives in warzones.

In January 2024, five fundraising hubs reorganized into the War Child Alliance. Adapting cutting-edge solutions for less privileged communities is one thing. However,

War Child’s work goes beyond that to focus on users living in environments with severely degraded, if not destroyed, infrastructure, which requires a different approach to design.

Stannard said War Child’s edtech projects “need to work offline and not require a server every 30 minutes.” Safety is also a concern, as is ensuring that edtech projects don’t put student data at risk in a war zone.

Lucy Lake, director of global engagement for the Yidan Prize, agreed that edtech projects in marginalized communities need a different design approach.

“We see curricular learning resources designed with a certain spectrum of the population in mind—usually better off, urban kids,” she explained.

Instead, educators working in marginalized communities must design materials based on their own experiences. Other design-led organizations are considering adapting design techniques to tackle social problems.

The Design for Good alliance runs two-year programs where designers from member companies like Microsoft and Nestle work with development organizations to solve real-world social issues.

Each year, the Yidan Prize celebrates two nominees—one for “education research,” the other for “education development”—and rewards them with a 15 million Hong Kong dollar ($1.9 million USD) cash prize and an additional 15 million Hong Kong dollar project grant.

Lake explained that winners need to be “transformative.” She’s also a prize laureate, having won in 2020 for her work with the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), a non-government organization that educates girls and young women in African countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The prize money allows education researchers and organizations to take risks in “relatively underexplored, high-risk areas like edtech.”

(Source: Fortune via Reuters Connect)