From Empty Cups to Resilient Classrooms: Five Lessons from GPE KIX Research on Teacher Wellbeing and Social-Emotional Learning in Conflict-Affected Contexts of Sub-Saharan Africa

Every morning, in classrooms across northern Ethiopia's Tigray region, a teacher arrives who has been displaced by conflict, lost family members to violence, and received no counselling, no grief support, and no mental health referral. She is expected to be a calm, emotionally present guide for fifty traumatized children, while managing her own trauma entirely alone. In northern Burkina Faso, a teacher whose salary may not arrive for months stands before children at wildly different emotional starting points: some have missed years of school, while others carry the shock of last week's attack. Without trauma training or any mental health professional in reach, he continues to show up.

These are not exceptions. They are the norm across GPE KIX partner countries affected by conflict. Yet education systems continue to design programmes as if the teachers in these classrooms were untouched by crisis, as if filling a post were the same as supporting a person.

This blog draws on multi-country, system-level evidence from GPE KIX-supported research in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Uganda and Zambia to make a single, urgent argument: teacher wellbeing is not a secondary issue. It is a critical system input, as essential as curriculum, infrastructure, or teacher supply. Social-emotional learning (SEL), building the skills that enable people to manage emotions, build relationships, and navigate adversity, is often treated as an optional addition to educational programming. Yet it is a crucial tool for recovery and resilience in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

A child who has fled violence cannot absorb a maths lesson until they first feel safe. A teacher carrying unresolved grief cannot build that safety until someone supports them. Most education systems in fragile and conflict-affected contexts offer neither. The five lessons below draw on insights from GPE KIX-supported research projects, showing what the gap looks like and how to close it.

Teachers in conflict zones are, by every measure, tough professionals — dedicated, resilient, and showing up under conditions that would break most people. However,  that dedication can mask how much is being asked of them - without pay, without support, without anyone asking how they are doing.

In Ethiopia’s conflict-affected regions of Amhara, Oromia and Tigray, implementing partners found they sometimes had to provide psychosocial support to teachers before those teachers could enter the classroom. Rather than building this into the programme at the design stage, the reality of the conditions teachers were facing left them no choice but to include it.

“You cannot pour from an empty cup, and our teachers’ cups are empty."
— Dr. Samuel Wollie, GPE KIX Speed School/ALP Scaling Study (Geneva Global, Ethiopia)

The form trauma takes varies by context. In active conflict zones — such as in Ethiopia or parts of South Sudan — it is acute: gunfire, displacement, sudden loss. In post-conflict settings in South Sudan, GPE KIX research documents “compound trauma”: the grinding weight of two years without pay, overloaded classrooms, and the complete absence of professional support. Among refugee teachers in Chad, Uganda and Zambia — 78% of those surveyed were refugees themselves — legal precarity and institutional invisibility are the dominant stressors: no contracts, no union membership, no collective voice.

In every context, the consequences are measurable. Unaddressed teacher trauma drives higher absenteeism, increased turnover, and the kind of disengaged or harsh teaching that compounds harm for already-vulnerable children. It would be a mistake to file this under soft wellbeing concerns. Each of these effects strikes directly at the access and learning outcomes GPE 2030 is meant to deliver. 

When agencies and ministries are “integrating SEL” into schools in Burkina Faso or South Sudan, whose understanding of emotions are they integrating? Most SEL frameworks in global use,  including CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), were designed in North American or European settings. When imported without adaptation, they can feel foreign, irrelevant, or disconnected from the lives they are meant to support.

Translation is not enough. The GPE KIX ACCESS project, implemented by War Child Alliance, found that the concept of “burnout” had no direct equivalent in several local languages. What teachers described instead were idioms closer to spiritual depletion — a sense of being hollowed out by accumulated loss. When programming was rebuilt around those local framings, teachers reported higher engagement and stronger application of the skills. Better design produced better outcomes.

Genuine contextualisation operates at three levels: the language and concepts used; the underlying values and constructs of emotional life; and the structure of the classroom itself. GPE KIX Speed School/ALP research in Ethiopia found that grouping students by prior schooling experience — rather than age — improved SEL integration, because a child who has never attended school is in a fundamentally different emotional place from one displaced mid-primary. This is a promising, context-specific insight rather than a universal recommendation , but it illustrates what genuine structural adaptation looks like.

“We really need to see crisis-affected contexts as sites of learning and innovation, not just places where we implement SEL.”
— April Coetzee, War Child Alliance

GPE 2030 — Gender lever:  Non-formal SEL models in West Africa show disproportionate benefits for girls — building confidence, improving retention, and equipping young women with skills formal schooling has failed to provide.

Across Ghana’s Upper East Region, which is now experiencing fragility and some conflict, only 15 out of 600 primary teachers applied for postings to conflict-affected areas (in six out of 14 districts). When a system offers no preparation, no support, and no recognition for its hardest posts, teachers tend not to go. A stress management workshop cannot fix that.

GPE KIX research shows that the forces driving the breakdown of teacher wellbeing are structural:

• Salaries that arrive months late, or not at all 
• Classrooms of 100 children with no materials 
• No one trained in psychosocial support, whether health professional or a community counsellor, anywhere in the education system to support a distressed child 
• Supervisors who check attendance but never ask how a teacher is coping

Most importantly, teacher training colleges in these areas are not equipped to provide SEL and psychosocial support training for student teachers preparing for postings in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Addressing this gap requires governments to take urgent steps to mainstream SEL and psychosocial support into pre-service teacher training.

The GPE KIX ACCESS project has developed a four-level response: tools for the individual teacher; a whole-school culture of support; community-level caregiver-teacher partnerships; and system-level advocacy for fair pay and manageable workloads. The GPE KIX Speed School project in Ethiopia adds a specific, often-overlooked recommendation: connect schools to Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) services and, where possible, school feeding programmes. A teacher who watches children go hungry every day carries an emotional weight the education system does not address.

Girls’ education models are providing evidence on approaches to SEL that are actually working in West Africa’s conflict-affected areas. In girls’ learning circles in northern Burkina Faso and Borno State, Nigeria, critical support is provided to girls who have been affected by conflict and trauma and want to return to school. Young women who complete those programmes transition into formal schooling at measurably higher rates and often come back to mentor the next generation.

Non-formal and Accelerated Education Programmes (AEPs) have embedded SEL into their design from the start, because they have had the flexibility to do so. They operate with smaller groups, often led by role models in the community. Facilitators help young women achieve foundational skills in reading, writing and numeracy, alongside life skills and livelihood training. Their curricula can adapt without a national approval process, and they are not bound by exam-focused accountability systems that crowd out relational teaching.

“CAMA really impacted me a lot. It built my confidence level and impacted my social life. It helped me to make good friends. I also learned how to educate the young ones.”
— CAMA alumna, Ghana, GPE KIX ACCELERATE+ (Associates for Change), baseline research

Scaling this into formal systems is hard:rigid curricula, exam pressures, and teacher workloads are real constraints. But the argument is not to copy non-formal models wholesale. Instead, formal systems should recognize that the innovations they are still trying to develop have already been built, tested, and refined elsewhere, and learn from them.

The pattern is familiar across the field of education in emergencies (EiE). Experts design a programme, governments approve it, agencies launch it, and teachers are trained to deliver it. Then it underperforms. GPE KIX-supported research offers a consistent explanation: teachers were not in the room.

The GPE KIX ACCESS project has completed three full co-design cycles for its CORE wellbeing programme: foundational workshops to understand teacher realities, piloting, adaptation workshops where teachers who experienced the programme propose changes, and validation workshops before release. In one cycle, teachers pointed out that the session on classroom stress management was scheduled during the busiest week of the school month. The programme was restructured. Participation improved markedly.

The GPE KIX Scaling Refugee Teacher Inclusion Models project went even farther to engage teachers: refugee teachers in Chad, Uganda and Zambia were trained as peer researchers, involved in every stage of the work. The research process became its own form of professional development.

“The training has helped me improve how I work with others, understand different needs better, and become more confident in supporting refugee teachers.”
— Peer researcher (refugee teacher), cited by Alison Joyner, GPE KIX Scaling Refugee Teacher Inclusion Models Study (Jigsaw Education/UNHCR)

The evidence is consistent: when teachers are partners in designing their own support, the support fits better, earns more trust, and outlasts the project that created it.

GPE KIX research is generating actionable evidence for change. Here is what it is calling for.

1. Treat teacher wellbeing as a crucial system input, not a wellness add-on

Ministries of Education: integrate a dedicated teacher wellbeing strand into Education Sector Plans, with budget lines and indicators tracked alongside those for access and learning outcomes in the same results frameworks. In GPE partnership compacts, this can also be linked to financing: results-based top-ups tied to teacher wellbeing outcomes, with timely salary payments and adequate support as the triggers. 

2. Build SEL and psychosocial support into how teachers are trained

Teacher education regulators: require supervised SEL and trauma-informed pedagogy in years 3 and 4 of pre-service programmes, with training institutions as co-designers of the content rather than recipients of it. 

3. Stop asking teachers to be mental health professionals without backup

Governments, Ministries and humanitarian actors: establish formal MHPSS referral pathways as a standard, budgeted feature of every EiE programme design. The cost of inaction is measurable in teacher turnover and learning loss.

4. Fund the bridge from non-formal SEL innovations into formal systems

Governments, ministries and humanitarian actors: study, adapt, and integrate what is already working in AEPs and girls’ learning circles, including certifying experienced facilitators as formal teachers and recognising peer mentoring networks as institutional assets.

“If we want education systems that support children to learn and thrive, we really have to start by supporting teachers — not only as teachers, but as people.”
— April Coetzee, War Child Alliance

The teacher in Tigray and the teacher in Burkina Faso cannot wait for a perfect programme. Everyday they show up and do the most demanding teaching imaginable, with almost none of the support they deserve. 

To build resilient education systems, we must start with what resilience actually requires: teachers supported as people; SEL treated as an equity tool; and crisis-affected communities recognised as knowledge centres, not just sites of need.

The evidence is here. The question is whether we act on it with the urgency it demands.