For children caught up in war and displacement, school can be one of the first things to slip away. The LEGO Foundation is putting $97 million into changing that, expanding International Rescue Committee programs that use play to help children learn and recover in conflict zones.

The five-year partnership, announced Wednesday, aims to reach 5 million children across East Africa and the Middle East.

“Children who are born in conflict have their childhood stolen from them,” IRC President David Miliband told The Associated Press. “But what’s remarkable about children is that if you give them a bit of their childhood back, they make the most of it. And this is about giving the best of childhood back.”

The partnership will shift as conflicts change. LEGO Foundation CEO Sidsel Marie Kristensen said the focus will be on children in “the most dire contexts.” Countries now under consideration are Ethiopia, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Uganda.

Kristensen said the “truly agile” framework is built to take play-based learning to the places that need it most, instead of tying funding to individual grants in places that may no longer match conditions on the ground.

“In the world we are living in right now, nobody knows honestly what is happening tomorrow or in two months,” Kristensen said. “That (flexibility) is what we need right now.”

The funding will expand an IRC-led program called PlayMatters, which trains teachers of children aged 3 to 12 to work “playful learning” into lessons. The program is designed to help educators adapt teaching to the needs that come up in schools serving children traumatized by crisis.

Program leaders also work with government officials to build their materials into national curriculums and advocate for education funding.

At a primary school for refugees in western Uganda’s Nakivale settlement, teacher Sister Kasingye Secunda said PlayMatters helped cut absenteeism. She said attendance used to be a problem, even though teachers tried to make students “feel at home.” Many students do not understand both the local language and English, the language of instruction.

Secunda said children learn colors through a game where they choose mangoes, bananas and other fruits to share with classmates. They build confidence through class presentations and develop leadership by taking turns leading small groups through activities.

“Learners enjoy the lessons,” Secunda said. “They are eager to come to school.”

PlayMatters Project Director Martin Omukuba said the program is also expanding digitally delivered multimedia lessons. A radio show used from Ethiopia to Tanzania helps children name their emotions through episodes in multiple languages with culturally familiar characters.

Omukuba said the radio show also helps reach schools in South Sudan that flooding cuts off for half the year.

The LEGO Foundation’s flexible funding allows the IRC to respond as conflicts shift, Omukuba said. He said a refugee class can quickly grow from 25 to 150 students, bringing new pressure on sanitation, nutrition and other classroom needs that are not usually treated as education spending.

Omukuba said the LEGO Foundation gives the IRC room to move grant money around in emergencies.

“We need first to make sure that children are alive,” he said. “We can introduce the education when they are stabilized.”

The two groups first worked together in 2019, when the LEGO Foundation committed $100 million to “Ahlan Simsim,” a show by the IRC and Sesame Workshop for children affected by the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises.

Kristensen, who leads the Denmark-based corporate foundation focused on early childhood development, said the group has been increasing its giving in these settings. The LEGO Foundation also recently announced a separate $30 million partnership with Co-Impact to support locally led work on learning and wellbeing for children affected by conflict and crisis.

She said she hopes Wednesday’s announcement prompts more cooperation among governments, civil society and the private sector.

“That is so needed in a world right now where the development aid is decreasing,” she said, referring to international assistance cuts by the United States and many European nations.

Those cuts have already strained the humanitarian system over the past year. Miliband said the Ebola outbreak in Congo is “a graphic demonstration of the short-sightedness of aid cuts for activities that are considered marginal.”

He pointed to sanitation and handwashing programs in Congo’s Ituri province, where the outbreak is centered, that lost US funding last year during the Trump administration’s rollback of international development spending.

“We warned at the time what the risk was,” he said. “And sure as night follows day, we end up with an under-detected Ebola outbreak.”

IRC officials said they see early childhood development as a necessary response to toxic stress that changes brain development and slows learning.

Patty McIlreavy, president and CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, said education was already underfunded in humanitarian responses before wealthy countries cut aid budgets. She said “Life saving” aid had been defined too narrowly as “what do you actually need to keep the body alive,” leaving out “life sustaining” efforts such as children’s education.

She said Wednesday’s announcement offers an example for donors looking for ways to help in conflicts with no clear end.

“It’s not our role as philanthropy to fix what’s broken in a country,” she said. “That’s politics. That’s bigger than us. But there’s so much we can do even by offering six months or a year of education.”

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