Conflict, forced displacement, and protracted crises continue to reshape education systems worldwide. Today, an estimated 258 million school-aged children and adolescents living in crisis-affected contexts require urgent support to access quality education, while 93 million are completely out of school (Education Cannot Wait 2025). Yet despite growing need, international support is shrinking. In a context where just 50.3% of requested funds for humanitarian interventions were met in 2024,  Education in Emergencies (EiE) received only 29.9% of the funding required (UNESCO 2025, Geneva Global Hub for Education in Emergencies 2025). Beyond emergency aid, the share of international aid allocated to education also fell below 6% in 2023. Looking ahead, global aid to education is projected to decline by up to 30% between 2023 and 2027, while low- and lower-middle-income countries that rely heavily on external financing for education are expected to lose one-fifth of their education aid by 2026 (UNESCO 2025). 

As crises become increasingly prolonged, education systems are facing a fundamental financing challenge: how can they continue, in a Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus approach, to move beyond short-term emergency response to ensure children continue learning while building more resilient systems for the future? 

To explore this evolving landscape, the Education Finance Network (EFN) spoke with Christian Stoff and Nasser Faqih from Education Cannot Wait (ECW), Louise Thaller from NORRAG, and Luke Stannard from Can’t Wait to Learn. Together, they share perspectives on the changing financing landscape for EiE and how education financing must evolve to build more resilient education systems. 

Impact of declining aid on Education in Emergencies

As humanitarian and development funding continues to decline, the consequences extend far beyond shrinking budgets. Funding cuts are reshaping the entire EiE ecosystem – from the difficult choices funders are increasingly being forced to make to the organizations delivering services and the children they can reach. 

For global financing mechanisms such as Education Cannot Wait (ECW), these pressures are fundamentally reshaping how resources are allocated. Nasser Faqih explains that education – already one of the least-funded humanitarian sectors – has been disproportionately affected by recent aid reductions. Recognizing this reality, ECW revised its latest strategic plan, with Faqih noting, “The global funding landscape has changed dramatically. Our strategy reflects that reality – not by lowering our ambition for children, but by setting a financing target that is both ambitious and achievable in today’s environment. The question is no longer simply how much money can be raised, but how every dollar can unlock greater impact through strategic partnerships, innovation and catalytic investment.” 

For Luke Stannard from Can’t Wait to Learn, one of the greatest risks is the erosion of local education ecosystems. While international NGOs have traditionally dominated EiE distribution over the years, national and local organizations often provide the continuity needed to sustain education throughout prolonged crises. As he explains, when funding falls, it is these local actors that are hit hardest, weakening the infrastructure needed to deliver both formal and non-formal education.  

However, the impact is felt most acutely by children. Drawing on NORRAG’s research, Louise Thaller warns that reduced funding is pushing more children out of school, making recovery harder and more costly. She highlights that children who have already dropped out are significantly more difficult and expensive to bring back, underscoring the urgency of protecting learning continuity before children become excluded from the system altogether. 

Together, these experiences point to a broader challenge: declining aid is not simply reducing the resources available for education – it is forcing funders to make difficult choices about where support is directed, weakening local delivery systems and increasing the risk of children being permanently excluded from learning. As the financing landscape tightens, sustaining learning continuity will require both the mobilization of more resources and more strategic deployment. 

Where Current Financing Falls Short

The conversations also highlighted deeper structural challenges within today’s financing architecture. Beyond the overall decline in aid, current financing models often struggle to support the local leadership, learning outcomes, and long-term system resilience needed to respond to increasingly protracted crises.  

One of the clearest gaps is localization. While local organisations are often the first responders and remain embedded in communities long after international actors leave, they continue to face significant barriers to accessing direct, flexible, and multi-year funding. In 2023, only 4.4% of tracked international humanitarian funding (excluding sub-grants and sub-contracts) was channelled directly to local actors (INEE 2025). Thaller reminds that localization objectives go beyond adequate financing for local actors – it is about shifting power and decision-making. As she explains, “Reliable, systematic consultation processes should involve the local communities, those who make education systems and children themselves,” especially as many crises now persist for a decade or longer. 

The conversations also highlighted the risk that constrained budgets could shift attention away from learning outcomes and back towards measuring access alone. Stannard warns that when resources tighten, “learning improvement is the first thing to go,” despite growing evidence that meaningful learning gains are possible even in crisis settings. Stoff similarly emphasises that the goal must go beyond getting children back into classrooms to also “ensuring that the programming that we do improves learning outcomes.” This includes not only academic progress but also addressing the social-emotional impacts of crises through psychosocial support.

As crises become more prolonged, financing models must invest in locally-led responses, protect learning and wellbeing alongside access, and strengthen systems that enable children to continue learning throughout and beyond crisis. 

What Is Working: Lessons from Can’t Wait To Learn, Education Cannot Wait and NORRAG

Despite mounting funding pressures, the conversations also highlighted a shared optimism: the future of EiE depends not simply on mobilizing more funding, but on financing differently. 

A recurring theme across all three conversations was the need to move beyond short-term humanitarian response towards strengthening national education systems. Stannard points to Can’t Wait to Learn’s experience in Ukraine as an example: “We’ve just handed across to the Ministry of Education, who now own Can’t Wait to Learn. It’s part of their digital education architecture.” He argues that governments must be engaged as long-term partners from the outset, with programs designed to align with national priorities so that they can ultimately be sustained and scaled through government systems. 

The conversations also highlighted the growing importance of evidence in guiding financing decisions. As resources become more constrained, “cost per child and cost-effectiveness should be the most important indicators within EiE,” argues Stannard, particularly as donors seek to maximize impact from limited resources. Thaller argues that outcome-based approaches can help build confidence among both traditional and new funders “if the targets were set against interventions that have proven to work and that are part of the humanitarian response plan.” 

Finally, experts agreed that ODA alone will be insufficient to meet future needs, creating an opportunity to diversify financing through philanthropy, blended finance, and other innovative mechanisms. Drawing on Can’t Wait to Learn’s experience in Ukraine, Stannard explains that “different types of funding support different phases of a program,” with institutional and government funding supporting long-term maintenance and scale, while other forms of finance can enable innovation and early-stage development. Looking ahead, Faqih argues that the future of education financing will depend on mobilizing a broader coalition of partners, “The future is not about choosing between public and private finance, it is about bringing them together. Official development assistance remains the foundation, but we see an opportunity to use it more strategically to catalyze additional investment. Education has been slower than sectors such as climate and health in developing innovative financing models, and ECW is working with partners to build proof-of-concept initiatives that can demonstrate how blended finance can unlock new capital for children affected by crisis.” 

While these emerging approaches hold promise, experts stressed that they should complement – not replace – humanitarian financing. As declining ODA leaves resilience-building and system strengthening underfunded, innovative financing can help bridge immediate crisis response with longer-term system strengthening. Thaller also cautions that new mechanisms must remain grounded in ethical principles, particularly around equity, and remain aligned with humanitarian principles and education objectives. This could apply to mechanisms like outcome-based financing incentivize certain outcomes based on context-specific education objectives and could “tailor their targets and pricing to and for education in emergency settings.” 

Looking Ahead: Financing Education Systems That Can Withstand Crisis

Across the conversations, a shared vision emerged: future financing must strengthen government systems, empower local actors, prioritise learning outcomes, and mobilise a broader range of capital to complement traditional humanitarian funding. Yet despite the challenging funding environment, the conversations also revealed cautious optimism about the future of EiE financing. 

For Faqih, the challenge is not a lack of capital, but the sector’s ability to unlock it, “The question is no longer whether the capital exists, because it does and in abundance. The question is whether we can build the partnerships, financing models and enabling systems to channel that capital towards children affected by crisis. If we can demonstrate what works, we have an opportunity to fundamentally reshape how education in emergencies is financed.” He also points to growing momentum among governments, financial institutions, and policymakers to pioneer new financing approaches for EiE.  

The opportunity now is to build financing systems that are as resilient and adaptable as the children and communities they are designed to serve. Doing so will be essential to ensuring that every child continues to learn – not only during crises, but long after they have passed. 

This article was authored by Atma Charles, Program Manager at the Education Finance Network (EFN), with contributions from Alison Joyner and Louise Thaller (NORRAG), Christian Stoff and Nasser Faqih (Education Cannot Wait) and Luke Stannard (Can’t Wait to Learn). 

Disclaimer: This article reflects insights and views shared by contributors in virtual interviews.