Foundational learning and climate resilience: Two sides of the same coin

Momentum around foundational learning has been growing – and rightly so. These skills are the bedrock of every child’s future; without them, progress in school (and life) quickly falters.

But one question keeps coming up: how do we protect these gains when schooling itself is increasingly disrupted by floods, heatwaves or other shocks? More than a billion children live in climate-vulnerable areas (UNICEF, 2021). In low-income countries, children already lose an average of 45 school days each year to climate-related disruptions, compared with just six days in high-income contexts (World Bank, 2024).

This isn’t just an ‘emergencies’ issue. It’s a foundational learning issue. If schools close, it’s early reading, mathematics and social skills that suffer first. That means foundational learning and climate resilience aren’t parallel tracks, they’re two sides of the same coin.

A challenge for every education system

COVID-19 showed how costly interruptions can be: seven months of closures were modelled to cut learning by 0.9 learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) and US$25,000 in lifetime earnings per student, with global losses of up to US$16 trillion (Azevedo J. et al, 2021).

Climate shocks are repeating that pattern year after year. And the impacts aren’t only in fragile states. Whether in Dhaka, Durban or Dallas, learning falters when children are kept out of school. If Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) really means all children, then resilience has to be part of the foundational learning story everywhere.

Smarter financing for learning continuity

Too often, education responses to crises rely on slow appeals. By the time money arrives, children may already have dropped out or lost skills they never recover. Pre-arranged disaster risk finance (DRF) can change that (IRC and World Bank, 2025).

By securing resources in advance, ministries can:

• Prepare continuity plans: learning packs, scripted lessons and simple digital modules.
• Respond rapidly: automatic payouts to keep teachers paid, school feeding going, and temporary or remote learning in place.
• Recover: catch-up programmes, re-enrolment drives, and resilient classrooms.

We’ve already seen what this can achieve. In Haiti, after Hurricane Matthew, rapid, pre-arranged financing helped 9,000 children return to school quickly, with the World Bank calculating a 19–25% internal rate of return on those rehabilitations (World Bank, 2017).

But pre-arranged finance isn’t just about bricks and mortar: continuity measures like teacher salary protection or rapid provision of learning materials have been just as vital for safeguarding foundational skills (IRC & World Bank, 2025).  And there’s growing evidence that remote education can work when designed with foundational learning in mind. Radio listening groups in Nigeria (Ebubedike, 2022), SMS learning platforms in Kenya (Jordan, 2024), pre-loaded tablets in refugee settings (Tobin, 2021), simple phone tutoring in southern Africa (Angrist et al., 2023) and WhatsApp groups in Lebanon (Schwartz, K, et al, 2023) all showed measurable gains.

These examples show that with structured content, local adaptation, and attention to equity, even very low-tech delivery can sustain literacy and numeracy when school is disrupted.

Protecting education budgets

Most education spending comes from governments – about three-quarters of the total worldwide – with households paying much of the rest. Aid makes up less than 1% even in low-income countries (World Bank, 2024). That means when disasters hit, families are often left to cover extra costs, and the poorest children are the ones most likely to drop out.

Yet at the very moment households and ministries need help, international finance is largely absent. Of US$1.3 trillion in climate finance in 2021/22, just 0.001% reached education (UNESCO, 2024).

This is where pre-arranged finance can make the difference: protecting domestic education budgets from being wiped out, easing the burden on families, and avoiding the far higher costs of remedial programmes later.

Bringing the agendas together

As the What Works Hub for Global Education has argued in its clarion call for efficient solutions and its recent blog on climate-resilient education, learning outcomes depend as much on resilience as on pedagogy. In our recent report we argued the need for a new financing architecture that can crisis-proof foundational learning. The ideas include:

• Hard-wiring foundational learning priorities into payout protocols: scripted lessons, early numeracy practice, catch-up kits.
• Embedding DRF into education sector plans and budgets, linking with climate adaptation funds for resilient schools.
• Using education-calibrated triggers like heat thresholds tied to learning loss, not just life-saving thresholds.

Taken together, these measures show how we can stop splitting foundational learning and resilience into separate boxes.

A call to action

SDG4 commits us to all children, not only those in stable settings. To deliver on that promise, we need to make foundational learning crisis-proof.

Those of us working on foundational learning and those focused on education in emergencies are ultimately pushing towards the same goal: children who keep learning, whatever the circumstances.

That’s why this is a call to education actors across the sector from the What Works Hub for Global Education to the Coalition for Foundational Learning, to the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) members and others. Together, we can help countries embed pre-arranged finance, adopt education-sensitive triggers, and ring-fence funds for literacy, numeracy, and resilient rebuilding.

If we connect these dots, we’ll not only protect progress on foundational learning but also build the resilience of education systems needed to respond to the challenges ahead. And that’s the kind of shift we need if we’re serious about learning for all.