RRT Cluster Coordinator deployed to support Whole of Syria Sector Coordination

Arpana Pandey, Rapid Response Team - Cluster Coordinator, was deployed to Amman, Jordan in 2019 to support the Whole of Syria (WoS) Education Sector for 8 weeks.

The Syria crisis is now entering its ninth year and has had a disastrous impact on the lives of children, youth and their families. Since 2011, the crisis has affected over 11.8 million Syrians. Of that, 6.2 million Syrians have been internally displaced, multiple times, and 5.6 million have sought refuge in a host country. The WoS Education Sector estimates that some 5.9 million school-aged children, including 2.8 million girls, and about 245,000 education personnel, including 57,000 females, are in need of education assistance inside Syria.

Approximately, 3.5 million school-age boys and girls are in areas with acute need. Arpana was deployed to support the WoS Education Sector with the development of a Multi-Year Resilience Program (MYRP) facilitated by Education Cannot Wait (ECW). At the end of last year, the ECW Secretariat announced that it would award funding for a MYRP for WoS with 30 million proposed as seed money.

The MYRP will cover a period of three years and provide a framework to leverage and align additional resources for EiE. Arpana's role was to specifically to initiate the process (establish a task force for overseeing the proposal development, develop a road-map, organize consultations with different actors through hubs and working groups to ensure needs on the ground and challenges are considered in the design of the proposal. By the end of her deployment, Arpana had coordinated the development of the zero draft of the MYRP proposal. She had also set up the mechanism for overseeing proposal development, and led a consultation workshop for task force members and experts from different sectors and thematic areas.