Delivering education in situations of conflict and crisis is central to efforts to protect children and youth in the near-term and fostering peaceful coexistence over the longer-term. But how can education enable individuals and communities to build durable futures when there is great uncertainty about where these futures will be?

The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), together with PositiveNegatives, have recently released ‘An Agent of Change’, an animated video designed to reach new and wider audiences to highlight the importance of refugee education in rebuilding lives.

The animated story brings to life the narratives of refugee students and teachers in the Dadaab refugee camps of Kenya, and sheds light on the multitudes of challenges affecting refugee learning.

The story was created based on research by Hassan Aden, a Doctoral Researcher at PRIO and PhD student at Gothenburg University. The animation script was written by Hanna Ali, a British-Somali writer who is the artistic director of Kayd Somali Arts and Culture in London. Ali and Aden discuss their collaboration on an episode of PRIO’s Peace in a Pod podcast, which you can access here.

This is the latest in a series of collaborations between PositiveNegatives and PRIO researchers using animations and comics as tools for communicating key messages to diverse audiences. You can read more about the talented creative team behind this animation here.

The animation is created as part of the ‘Refugee Education: Building Durable Futures’ project at PRIO, led by Cindy Horst (PRIO) and funded by the Research Council of Norway.

In this associated PRIO policy brief, ‘Refugee Education: A Long-Term Investment‘, Horst and Aden present ‘lessons learned’ from the Dadaab refugee camps to argue that a substantial shift is needed that enables long-term investment in educating children in protracted refugee situations. You can access the the policy brief here.