Evaluation of UNICEF’s Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme, UNICEF, November 2015

The Peacebuilding, Education, and Advocacy programme – Learning for Peace – underwent a programme outcome evaluation in 2015.

The evaluation report, overall, conveys that the Learning for Peace programme delivered meaningful results in strengthening social cohesion, resilience, and human security across its five outcome areas of: 1) integrating conflict-sensitivity and peacebuilding into education policies and vice versa; 2) building institutional capacities of institutions—i.e., UNICEF, governments, implementing partners, schools, etc.—to supply conflict-sensitive education; 3) developing individual and community capacities to mitigate conflict and promote peace; 4) increase access to conflict-sensitive education; and 5) generating evidence on the role of social services in building peaceful societies.

The report contains eight overarching conclusions and seven overarching recommendations. Key conclusions include:
1) The choice of using a social service such as education for delivering peacebuilding results was the right one;
2) UNICEF is well-positioned to engage in peacebuilding work based on its mandate and institution strengths; and
3) Strong leadership support is required to enable cross-sectoral collaboration and mainstream peacebuilding solutions

Key recommendations include:
1) UNICEF should articulate a clearer vision for its role and contribution to peacebuilding and integrate it into corporate strategies, global program policy, country program strategies, and in key messages;
2) UNICEF, as a minimum program action, should institutionalize conflict analysis as a part of the program development cycle and ascertain the use of the findings in programming; and
3) UNICEF should consolidate lessons learned and use them to develop resources for education sector planning

Download the full report: Evaluation of UNICEF’s Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme