Emergency education response becomes national infrastructure

post 2 long and thin

In the middle of a war, an emergency education response is built from the ground up to be owned by the school system.

With millions of children forced out of their classrooms by conflict in Ukraine, Can't Wait to Learn built an emergency education response tailored for Ukraine, with full government input. It reached 250,000+ children and became a permanent part of national infrastructure.

THE PLACE
Ukraine

THE INVESTMENT
A response aligned to the system from the outset

THE WIN
250,000+ children reached and permanant roll-out

KATERYNA'S STORY

Kateryna has only just started grade 3, and has already faced more than any child should. Since the full-scale war began, her family has moved repeatedly.

They left Novohrodivka in Donetsk Oblast in February 2022, evacuated to Chernihiv Oblast in November 2024, and moved again in May 2025 to a small village in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with little internet and frequent power cuts. Each move meant a new home and learning in an unfamiliar place. 

Kateryna says,"It was difficult for me to move all the time. Everything was new each time. But I wanted to keep learning and not fall behind the other children." 

The Can't Wait to Learn application became a fixed point, something she could open wherever she was living, to revise and keep moving forward even when her connection to school was thin. 

"When we have electricity and internet, I open Can't Wait to Learn and complete the activities. I like that learning there is interesting. I feel happy when I get the answers right."

Her teacher noticed that it protected more than her knowledge.

"Despite repeated displacement and difficult living conditions, Kateryna continues to learn. The application helped her stay connected to the learning process, maintain her interest in education, and continue progressing at her own pace." 

THE PROBLEM

From February 2022, full-scale war forced millions of Ukrainian children out of their classrooms through school closures, displacement and damage to infrastructure. More than 2,200 schools were damaged and nearly 300 destroyed.

For children in grades one to four, this struck during the critical window for foundational literacy and numeracy, interrupting structured learning at the point it matters most.

TAKING ACTION

Ukraine retained real institutional capacity: a functioning Ministry of Education and Science and an existing national system. This made it possible to design a response aligned to the system from the outset, rather than a parallel humanitarian service running beside it. 

When Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science reached out to Can't Wait to Learn in 2022, a co-creation process brought together Ukrainian teachers, curriculum specialists, artists and officials alongside the Can't Wait to Learn team.

The result was a Ukraine-specific version of the Can't Wait to Learn platform, mapped to the national curriculum and carrying characters and content that reflect Ukrainian culture.

The programme was delivered through a three-tier partnership: War Child Alliance and Can't Wait to Learn as technical and pedagogical lead, the Ukrainian civil-society organisation Osvitoria as local knowledge and community interface, and the Ministry as institutional anchor. 

INVESTMENT SUCCESS!

More than 250,000 children accessed structured, curriculum-aligned learning through the platform between 2022 and 2026, at near-national scale, with teacher training deployed across almost all accessible regions and more than 3,500 primary teachers trained through a government-certified pathway.

KEY WINS

250,000+
children reached through the platform (2022 to 2026)

Emergency to national system -
formally integrated into Ukraine's national learning platform

3,500+ teachers trained and government-certified

WHY INVESTMENT WORKED

Government as a design input, not a handover condition

Ministry involvement from the first Memorandum of Understanding in 2022, not at the programme's end, built official credibility and ownership before scale.

Curriculum alignment as credibility

Mapping every learning interaction to the national syllabus allowed the Ministry to endorse the platform and make it legitimate inside the system. 

Civil society as a structural partner

Osvitoria's contextual and curriculum knowledge made localisation genuine and teacher buy-in real, not a subcontracted afterthought.

Technology as system infrastructure, not emergency workaround

Built for integration and government ownership from day one, giving it a different cost and sustainability profile from a tool retrofitted later.

Built for the hardest conditions

Offline-first so it works without reliable internet, adaptive to each child's pace and prior attainment, and designed to support teachers rather than replace them.

Teachers professionalised, not bypassed

More than 3,500 primary teachers trained through a government-certified pathway.

THE ROLE OF PATIENT CAPITAL

It is rare, in an emergency, for a donor group, a government and a delivery partner to design for government ownership from day one. It worked here for two reasons.

First, Ukraine already had a digital education strategy. It was only a draft, but it was real, and in 2021 the education cluster co-leads obliged the sector to work to it rather than around it.

Second, Can't Wait to Learn and its donors chose to back that strategy rather than arrive with a finished product and hope it fitted. Agreement with senior ministry officials was the starting point, not the design; what the tool became was settled through engagement with mid-level officials and, above all, with teachers and children.

In conflict, conditions differ sharply within a single country and change from month to month, so a specification fixed at proposal stage would have been obsolete inside a year.

That kind of adaptive management is not what most institutional and philanthropic structures reward. It asks donors to fund a direction rather than a deliverable, and to accept slower visible progress in exchange for a system a government can eventually run itself.

The foundation is trust, extended before the evidence arrives, with evidence generation built into the plan. The outcome is a public asset rather than a project.

RIGOROUS RESEARCH IN CONFLICT

Peer-reviewed research is the strongest available test of whether a learning platform works, and this was the first time the donor group had run such research in an active conflict. It funded that test and waited for it.

The result is a mixed-methods quasi-experimental study across 36 schools in Cherkasy Oblast, producing two papers, an efficacy study and a wider stakeholder evaluation, intended to inform both scale-up and the wider sector. Both are currently under peer review, so findings are not reported ahead of publication, though a research brief and a film on conducting research in conflict are already available.

It is often said that rigorous research cannot be done in a conflict setting. Randomisation may well be unethical where allocation decides which children get to learn, but that rules out one design, not all of them.

Quasi-experimental work is feasible, particularly when it is planned with the government whose schools are involved. Evidence matters on two fronts: it tells a funder whether the investment was sound, and it earns credibility with the group that ultimately decides whether a platform is used at all, namely teachers. 

PARTNERS AND PHILANTHROPY

The programme was delivered by War Child Alliance with Osvitoria and the Ministry of Education and Science, and made possible by education philanthropy.

War Child's handover names the Jacobs Foundation, Fourfold Foundation and Federer Foundation among the donor partners whose support helped bring the initiative to scale and enabled its transition into a nationally owned system.

In 2024, Can't Wait to Learn received the Yidan Prize for Education Development, the field's largest award, recognising its work across eight conflict-affected countries. The Ministry has described Can't Wait to Learn as a model for cooperation between government, international donors, and a technically focused international non-profit. 

CAN'T WAIT TO LEARN UKRAINE AT A GLANCE

WHERE

Ukraine (national), also delivered in Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, South Sudan and other crisis-affected countries 

TIMEFRAME

2022 to 2026

IMPLEMENTED BY

Can't Wait to Learn, hosted by War Child Alliance

LOCAL PARTNER

Osvitoria (Ukraine)

GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

Ministry of Education and Science; Institute of Educational Analytics (technology); Institute for Education Development (content); State Service of Quality Education

FOCUS

Grades 1 to 4; foundational literacy and numeracy; digital personalised learning in emergencies

REACH & OUTCOME

250,000+ children; 3,500+ government-certified teachers. Handover to government completed in 2026; integrated into the All-Ukrainian School Online

 

PHILANTHROPY

Jacobs Foundation, Fourfold Foundation, Federer Foundation; Yidan Prize for Education Development (2024)

RESEARCH

Mixed-methods quasi-experimental study across 36 schools in Cherkasy Oblast; two papers under peer review

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