Lesson Learned from Education Cannot Wait Commitment to Localization, Uganda

In 2022, Save the Children, which hosts the Uganda Education Consortium (UEC), together with UNHCR, were selected as co-grantees for the Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Seed Funding Contribution to the ECW Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP), and for the First Emergency Response (FER), by the Uganda Education Response Plan for Refugees and Host Communities (ERP) Steering Committee. In Uganda, the ECW funded programmes are designed to reinforce and support the implementation of, and resource mobilization for, the ERP, and as such their content is aligned to ERP outcomes.

It is fully aligned to the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), and its implementation is overseen by the Ministry of Education and Sports who chair a multi-stakeholder Steering Committee, and house the ERP Secretariat, responsible for the day to day operations of the ERP. The ERP itself calls for the increased involvement of local actors in the delivery of the plan, including through a direct call to iNGOs to ensure local humanitarian actors are supported to play a greater role in implementation, coordination and decision-making processes.

Through this process, Street Child and Save the Children have ensured that within the new ECW funded programmes in Uganda, the UEC is achieving the Grand Bargain commitments of 25% of funding going to L/NNGOs with 33% of MYRP programme funding being received by L/NNGOs and 26% of FER programme funding.1 This exceeds the amount of funding sub-granted to L/NNGOs through the previous ECW MYRP seed grant considerably,2 demonstrating the effectiveness of ring-fenced funding combined with additional support to ensure L/NNGOs access larger donor grants.