Perceptions of School and Community Safety and Links to Education Outcomes in Contexts of Forced Displacement: Evidence and Mitigation Strategies from Project 21 Countries in the Central Sahel

Abstract

Ensuring the provision of equitable, safe, and sustained learning in crisis-affected settings requires trustworthy and usable data on the risks in and around schools. However, evidence of this quality on safety at school and in the community in contexts of forced displacement is limited. In this article, Using Project 21 (P21), an interagency, cross-border, community-based monitoring initiative in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, and Niger, we examine perceptions of school and community safety, their association with education outcomes, and strategies that can mitigate risks to school safety. Our descriptive analysis shows that school participation in these P21 countries is only 46 percent, and lower among forcibly displaced households (40%). Perceived lack of safety in schools and the community is high; 41 percent of surveyed households judged schools unsafe and 33 percent felt unsafe in their communities. Our logistic regression analysis finds a significant relationship between school participation and perceptions of both school and community safety, as well as a decrease in the odds of school participation among forcibly displaced households. Our qualitative findings indicate that effective mitigation in these P21 countries, which are located in the Central Sahel, requires a layered package that includes sustained preparedness and emergency planning; systematic protection and gender-based violence (GBV) mainstreaming, which we define as the systematic integration of protection principles and GBV risk mitigation into educational programming, along with water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions, psychosocial support, and referral pathways; adaptive delivery and proximity-based infrastructure, such as establishing learning centers closer to communities, to reduce exposure to transit-related hazards, including armed ambushes and improvised explosive devices; and deep community engagement to address social norms in highly insecure environments. This study strengthens the education in emergencies evidence base by showing how community-based monitoring can address critical gaps in the data on safety in displacement contexts while modelling ethical, locally grounded approaches to generating actionable evidence.