A Recovering Psychologist Gives her Thoughts

Ragnhild Dybdahl, Director of Education and Research Department at the Norwedian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) shares her experiences of the first day of presentations and workshops in Istanbul:

I found all the sessions I attended today interesting and inspiring. Those who know me will know that this is not obvious. This is the first time I attend a consultative meeting and I find the meeting of practitioners, academics, policy makers, donors refreshing. Peter Buckland’s areal overview of the aid architecture with its many acronyms and boxes explains why this is a map that is hard to grasp – and that the difference between the areal overview and the real world is often vast. His comments that the map of the aid architecture was not planned by an architect, but perhaps by a town planner, and what it shows is not really a town, but rather an informal settlement, were much appreciated. However, the relationship between the many parts of the global architecture on global and country levels were clarifying, and the increased significance of NGOs and the more proactive role of donors in the shaping of the architecture during the last ten years were interesting.

The presentation on school safety by Marla Petal was powerful, showing not only that disasters impact on education, but that prevention is possible.” It’s a technical field, but it’s not rocket science”. What we often call natural hazards such as floods, wind, earthquakes, drought, and tsunami lead to about 400 national disasters, an average of 74,000 deaths and more than 230 million people affected every single year. Thousands of children and teachers have died in school buildings, schools are destroyed and education disrupted. Disasters have physical, educational, economic and psychosocial impacts. Our task is to make every school a safe school. As a recovering psychologist (almost quoting Peter Buckland who claims to be a recovering bureaucrat), I particularly appreciated that she stressed that making schools safe is fundamental to psychosocial recovery. This linked well into the welcome address and opening statement by Prof Arslan, from the Turkish Ministry of Education. A civil ingeneer with a sound practical approach that fits the conference and speaking of Turkey’s experience (with one major earthquake every eight months),  he illustrated well the importance of planning, preparedness and quake resistance of buildings before crisis, as well as the impact on schooling during and after earthquakes – and the importance of resuming schooling as soon as possible, not only for learning purposes but to give structure and meaning in difficult times.

Also being a recovering academic, I suppose my favourite topics for discussion in the coffee breaks were about research needs. I thought the role of solid rigorous needs assessment, evaluation and monitoring was spoken of with more urgency and sincerity than I have heard in most other contexts. I found the expressed need for good research and the possibility to carry out research, even in difficult circumstances, encouraging. The session on researching education an protection in humanitarian emergencies (1/7) chaired by Lesley Bartlett sharing findings, methods and challenges from Afghanistan,  Darfur and several African countries was particularly impressive and inspiring. The presenters showed that it is possible to carry out research in these settings and gather observational data, not only self-report, and even carry out a large randomized controlled study in Afghanistan as presented by Dana Burde. Although there is no doubt that the ethical, logistical and methodological challenges are enormous, the need for solid research where we have a chance to look at effects, causality and working factors becomes clearer and clearer to me – partly to investigate the possible harm that we do. There is a lot to learn about how we can manage to create partnerships to enable us to do this type of research from the presenters in this session, as well as from the participants at the conference.