The LEGO Foundation has committed $97 million to expand International Rescue Committee programs that use play to help millions of children learn and recover in conflict zones, a fresh example of private wealth stepping into the wreckage left by war, aid cuts and collapsing public systems. The agreement was announced Wednesday and is part of a five-year partnership aimed at reaching 5 million children across East Africa and the Middle East.
Who Gets the Money, Who Gets the Burden
The children served will change as conflicts evolve, and LEGO Foundation CEO Sidsel Marie Kristensen said the foundation will focus on those “in the most dire contexts.” Currently under consideration are Ethiopia, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Uganda. The geography tells the story: children in places torn apart by conflict are the ones expected to adapt to whatever scraps of support the philanthropic apparatus decides to move around.
IRC President David Miliband said, “Children who are born in conflict have their childhood stolen from them. 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.” Kristensen said the framework is designed to be “truly agile” and to bring play-based learning wherever it is needed most, rather than funding individual place-based grants that might become outdated as conflicts evolve in real time. She said, “In the world we are living in right now, nobody knows honestly what is happening tomorrow or in two months. That (flexibility) is what we need right now.”
What the Program Actually Does
The investment will expand an IRC-led program called PlayMatters, which offers training for teachers of 3-to 12-year-olds to integrate “playful learning” into lessons. The goal is not to tell educators what they should teach but to help tailor instruction to the needs that arise in schools serving children traumatized by crises. Program leaders also act as policy advocates for education funding at the national level, working with government officials to embed their materials into curriculum.
At a primary school serving refugees in western Uganda’s Nakivale settlement, teacher Sister Kasingye Secunda said PlayMatters has reduced absenteeism. She said attendance used to be an issue, and that teachers try their best to make students “feel at home,” but many students do not understand both the local language and English, the language of instruction. She said children learn colors through a game in which they select mangoes, bananas and other fruits to share with classmates, build confidence through class presentations and develop leadership as they take turns guiding small groups through activities. “Learners enjoy the lessons,” Secunda said. “They are eager to come to school.”
From Ethiopia to Tanzania, a radio show helps children name their emotions through episodes offered in multiple languages featuring culturally familiar characters. PlayMatters Project Director Martin Omukuba said the program is expanding such digitally delivered multimedia lessons. He said the radio show helps them remotely reach schools in South Sudan that are made inaccessible by flooding for half the year. Omukuba said the LEGO Foundation provides flexible funding so the IRC can respond to the fluid nature of conflicts. He said a refugee class size can quickly jump from 25 to 150 students, creating new demands for sanitation, nutrition or other classroom needs not traditionally classified under education. He credited the LEGO Foundation for trusting them 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 Aid Machine and Its Limits
The partners first collaborated in 2019 when the LEGO Foundation committed $100 million to “Ahlan Simsim,” the show by IRC and the nonprofit Sesame Workshop that helps kids affected by the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises. Kristensen said the Denmark-based corporate foundation that funds early childhood development has been scaling up its donations in these settings. She said the LEGO Foundation recently announced a separate $30 million partnership with global funding collaborative Co-Impact to support locally led solutions to issues of learning and wellbeing among children impacted by conflict and crisis.
Kristensen said she wants the announcement to inspire greater collaboration 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.
Miliband said the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo provides “a graphic demonstration of the short-sightedness of aid cuts for activities that are considered marginal.” He pointed to sanitation and handwashing programs in the Congo’s Ituri province, where the global health emergency is centered, that lost U.S. funding last year as part of the Trump administration’s dismantling of international development. “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.”
International Rescue Committee officials said early childhood development is not a luxury but a necessary intervention to toxic stress that alters brain development and delays learning. Patty McIlreavy, the president and CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, said education was an underfunded part of humanitarian responses even before wealthy countries slashed their aid budgets. She said “life saving” assistance was too narrowly limited to “what do you actually need to keep the body alive,” a definition that excluded “life sustaining” efforts such as children’s education. McIlreavy pointed to the announcement as an example for donors who ask how they can help in complex conflicts without clear ends in sight. “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.”