Helping Children Outgrow War. SD Technical Paper.

Helping children outgrow war is an overarching goal of educational reconstruction in post-conflict settings, but responses must be highly adaptive and informed by insights gained from interventions elsewhere. This guidebook offers seven examples of successful interventions in post-conflict settings internationally, situating them within a framework that emphasizes the ecology of children's well-being and learning. To facilitate navigation of the guidebook, cases are organized according to post-conflict phases, including emergency, recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. These phases indicate the stability of government and the health of civil society, important parameters for guiding programmatic choices. The cases illustrate many of the key dimensions of a comprehensive approach to helping children overcome violence and rebuild their lives. Following each case study is a discussion of critical theoretical issues and a set of questions regarding practical considerations for project design. While not intended to serve as a training manual per se, the guidebook contains elements that can be extracted for use in training workshops or policy discussions. Following the Teacher Emergency Packages (kits which enable teachers to begin instructional activities in a war-ravaged context), cases are as follows: (1) Child Soldiers (exploitation of child fighters in Africa); (2) Butterfly Garden (Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, has a garden dedicated to creative play for war-affected children); (3) Children's Participation (illustrates challenges of children's participation in a conflict setting in Sri Lanka); (4) Peace Education (insights from a project in a Kenyan refugee camp); (5) Project DiaCom (in Bosnia, the project allows Serb and Bosniak teachers to enter into a dialogue process); (6) Community Leadership (builds capacity for community in internally displaced people in Azerbaijan); and (7) Human Rights Training (in Peru, a human rights organization conducts workshops that bring together diverse participants to learn about their rights and share experiences). (BT)