How can Sierra Leone’s education response after Ebola help with the COVID-19 response?

How can Sierra Leone’s education response after Ebola help with the COVID-19 response?

For this first blog in a series of three, let’s look at some practical and sensible lessons from the education response in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak, to help others as they face closures of education systems.

March 31, 2020 by Colin Bangay, Department for International Development (DFID)

Children waiting in line in a school in Sierra Leone. Credit: GPE/Stephan Bachenheimer

As DFID adviser in Sierra Leone, I’ve received a raft of emails recently on what can be learned about Sierra Leone’s education response to Ebola in 2014/2015.

COVID-19 with its asymptomatic transmission presents a different level of challenge to education systems. However, there are certainly useful lessons to share – particularly on rebooting education systems – but I will leave my DFID predecessors to comment on this in future blogs.

What I offer here are general thoughts on preparedness response in resource-challenged contexts and links to the Sierra Leone educational materials used to during the year that Ebola closed schools.