Why Cutting Education During Crises Costs More in the Long Run | Opinion

In today’s world, the education debate is often framed as a moral imperative, and it is. But that framing is no longer sufficient. In an era of protracted conflict, climate shocks and tightening public budgets, education is also something else: strategic infrastructure. When it collapses, instability accelerates. When it holds, societies recover faster, economies rebound sooner and fewer crises become permanent.

The data points are stark. UNESCO reports that 250 million children are out of school worldwide, and progress toward global education goals remains dangerously off track. At the same time, extreme weather is no longer a “future risk.” UNICEF estimates that at least 242 million students in 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by climate hazards in 2024 alone. And attacks on education are rising: One widely used global dataset recorded more than 11,000 attacks on schools, students and education personnel, and incidents of military use, between 2020 and 2023. These are not isolated education statistics. They are early warnings for broader political and economic turbulence.

When a child’s schooling is interrupted for months, or years, the consequences don’t stay in the classroom. Families already under stress often make rational, devastating choices: children go to work, girls are pulled from school first, early marriage increases and the probability of returning to education falls sharply. Over time, a learning crisis becomes a workforce crisis. Then it becomes a social cohesion crisis. And ultimately, it becomes an instability crisis, as communities lose the skills, trust and institutional confidence required to rebuild.

This is why policymakers should stop treating education in emergencies as a “nice-to-have” that can be deferred until stability returns. In much of today’s world, instability itself has become the operating environment. Conflict and climate disruption are defining features of the current decade. Education systems must therefore be designed to operate under pressure, not only in ideal conditions.

From experience working in conflict-affected settings, one lesson is clear: The most effective education response is not simply scaling access. It is building resilience into the system so learning continues even when schools close, families are displaced or public finances shrink. In active conflict contexts, education delivery has been sustained through flexible community-based models, accelerated learning to recover lost years and blended approaches that combine formal curricula with alternative pathways. These solutions have enabled children to remain connected to learning even amid displacement and insecurity, significantly reducing permanent dropout.

Field-tested approaches in fragile contexts point to three strategic shifts that matter most. First, protect education as essential civilian infrastructure. In conflict settings, schools must be treated as protected spaces and attacks on education must carry real political cost. Protecting education is not only about physical structures; it includes safeguarding teachers, ensuring safe routes to learning spaces, keeping schools free from military use and strengthening community-level protection mechanisms. Where education has been actively protected, communities have shown greater resilience and faster postcrisis recovery. Where protection fails, every other investment leaks.

Second, design for continuity, not perfection. Too often, emergency education is approached as a temporary patch; useful, but separate from the “real” system. That approach creates a false choice between speed and quality. The smarter approach is continuity with quality thresholds: accelerated learning to recover lost time, flexible models that function in displacement, psychosocial support to address trauma and remedial pathways that prevent children from being permanently left behind. The goal is not merely to keep children “enrolled,” but to keep them learning in ways that are measurable and transferable.

Third, link learning to economic participation, especially for youth. In fragile contexts, education that leads nowhere can fuel frustration and deepen exclusion. For adolescents and young adults, pathways into livelihoods are not optional add-ons; they are part of stabilization. In several conflict-affected countries, pairing education and skills training with access to livelihoods, through entrepreneurship support, financial literacy or work-readiness pathways, has helped young people sustain income, reduce dependency and resist negative coping mechanisms. This does not mean turning every classroom into a job training center. It means ensuring education builds transferable skills, literacy, numeracy, digital competency and problem-solving, and that youth have credible routes into training, apprenticeships, or enterprise support.

Making these shifts requires something that is in short supply: sustainable financing. Yet the argument for protecting education budgets is not sentimental; it is fiscally rational. The downstream costs of education collapse are expensive: long-term humanitarian dependence, weakened growth, higher unemployment, greater vulnerability to exploitation and the prolonged management of recurring crises. Education remains one of the few interventions that reduces multiple risks simultaneously.

This is also why partnerships matter. Governments, international organizations, civil society and the private sector each control different levers: policy, financing, service delivery and innovation. The most durable results occur when those levers are aligned, when emergency responses are designed to strengthen national capacity and when innovations are adopted not as pilots, but as part of system-wide planning.

Ultimately, the lesson is broader than any single institution or program. If governments want fewer crises to metastasize, and fewer societies to remain trapped in cycles of fragility, they must treat education as a strategic response to instability. That means protecting it during shocks, adapting it for continuity and connecting it to the skills and opportunities that sustain social cohesion.

Decision-makers should make a simple commitment: stop budgeting for education as if stability is guaranteed. It isn’t. The future belongs to countries that build education systems resilient enough to withstand disruption, and strong enough to help prevent the next one.

Al Jazi Darwish is director of communications and engagement at the Education Above All (EAA) Foundation.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.