This blog post was originally published in Up Front, the Brookings’ blog.

As the U.S. public anxiously monitors the impending fiscal cliff, good things are quietly happening in the field of global education. Last week, at the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) meeting at UNESCO in Paris, the board decided to allow funds to be dispersed for educating children trapped in humanitarian contexts. For the first time, the world’s only global fund for education will be able to rapidly support interventions for children and youth struggling to continue their education during and immediately after emergencies.

This is very good news for an organization that was founded 10 years ago to support education in good performing countries and in recent years has been heavily criticized for not supporting education in humanitarian contexts and fragile states, where almost half the world’s children who are out of school live. GPE has been slowly evolving and with this recent decision has clearly embraced its new vision of helping educate all children and youth, particularly those who are most marginalized.

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