Early Childhood Education in Crisis: Rethinking Care, Dignity, and Displacement

I’m Sally Ocharo, an MA student in International Development at ARU Cambridge, with a strong background in Early Childhood Education and International Development, having worked in advocacy, policy, research, and curriculum design. 

I’ve dedicated over 10 years to early childhood care, including contributing to crisis settings such as Kenya’s Turkana County near Kakuma Refugee Camp. These experiences ignited my passion for providing stability and routines that foster healing and growth for young refugees, and I’ve loved meeting like-minded people along the way. I look forward to continuing to highlight such stories with SolidariTee through advocacy campaigns such as this very blog. Enjoy the read!

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Growing up and working as a child expert in sub-Saharan Africa has profoundly shaped how I understand displacement, dignity, and care. Much of my work took place in communities marked by movement and uncertainty, places like Turkana County, home to Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. This camp opened in 1992, following the arrival of large numbers of Sudanese and Ethiopian people fleeing the protracted violence of their countries. The average refugee at Kakuma can spend seventeen years living at the camp (UNHCR). As of August 2025, the Kakuma Camp hosted 225,625 refugees and asylum seekers mainly from South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Burundi, Sudan, Uganda, Eritrea, and Rwanda (UNHCR, 2025). 

There, collaboration with county governments revealed the delicate balance between local needs and those of displaced populations. I witnessed how childcare systems were reimagined under pressure: makeshift learning spaces built from tarpaulin became hubs of hope where children could learn, play, and begin to heal from trauma. In these emergency classrooms, predictable lessons, familiar songs, and daily routines offered more than academic skills, they created a protective rhythm that helped children feel safe, rebuild trust in adults, and regain a sense of normalcy amidst chaos, echoing global evidence that education in crises can be lifesaving by providing structure, emotional support, and essential life‑skills.

Designing childcare in emergency settings taught me that survival and thriving are connected. Together with local educators and humanitarian partners, we created routines that offered children not just access to basic services but also stability — a sense of normalcy in the middle of chaos. The work of experts such as Dr. Lynne and Dr. Asmamaw deeply influenced this approach. In a documentary titled Journey of Early Childhood Development, we collaborated on featuring various great talents and experts in Early Childhood. Dr. Lynee and Dr. Asmamaw shed light on their contribution to children in emergency settings and how they explored  “curriculums on the go”  crafted for caregivers across the continent — flexible, portable lessons that could travel with families wherever displacement took them. It was humbling to see how ideas born in one refugee settlement could ripple across borders, adapting to new crises while maintaining the same core belief: that every child deserves not only to survive, but to grow, learn, and dream.

These encounters continually reinforce a vital truth for me — that solidarity begins with listening. When I think about people “on the move,” I no longer see statistics or victims, but communities full of resilience, innovation, and care networks that often work in spite of enormous systemic neglect. The courage of those families has challenged how I think about aid: it should not flow in one direction from “helper” to “helped,” but grow in circles of mutual learning and respect.

When I volunteer with SolidariTee, this perspective guides me. I no longer see advocacy as speaking for others, but as amplifying the collective wisdom I have learned from these children, parents, and practitioners. True solidarity, for me, is the act of recognising that any of us could one day be in their position — and ensuring that in such a world, compassion is not a privilege but a shared, practiced value. I hope to bring this experience into every space I enter, helping reshape how we think about migration, childhood, and belonging.