Unni Heltne, Ph.D student
“It’s hard to learn with hunger and gunshots”
Main content
Conflict and disaster represent significant barriers to quality education for children in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Such circumstances can prevent access to and quality of education, as well as disrupt the safety and learning environment in schools and local communities.
The overall goal of this project is to contribute to a better understanding of how to provide and improve psychosocial support in schools for children who are affected by unwanted experiences, and who live in conditions characterized by poverty and humanitarian disasters. The first step is to understand some of the mechanisms that prevent or facilitate such interventions. The project will seek knowledge about how teachers, parents and voluntary organizations perceive the traumas children experience, and how they perceive the consequences of the problems on children's participation in education and their general well-being.
Knowledge of these factors, and the extent to which they can act as barriers to providing psychosocial support, will be a valuable basis for the development and implementation of culturally acceptable and readily available low-threshold psychosocial help strategies.
The project will also provide concrete examples of possible strategies for psychosocial help, and challenges as well as opportunities to implement them. The focus will be on children exposed to conflict and disaster in the LMIC environment in Sudan and South Sudan. Qualitative interviews and open questionnaires for teachers, parents, NGO counselors and staff in a strategic, conventional sample (a total of 60 respondents) will be used to collect the data, and the project will use a transactional model to include both a trauma-focused and a psychosocial approach to understanding. The focus will be on both what falls under the concept of everyday resistance and what can be described as potential traumatic experiences (PTE), and the possible influence these factors may have on children in LMIC's participation in education. Children, and how they perceive the consequences of these adversities and on children's participation in education and their general well-being.
