Global Business Coalition for Education

REACTing Smarter

This month, the Global Business Coalition for Education launched a new, faster, and more intelligent version of the Rapid Education Action platform. Also known as REACT, the updated website expands on its mission to connect businesses with opportunities to contribute to organizations supporting education in emergencies. Check it out at www.now-REACT.org.

REACT, originally launched in 2016, revolutionized corporate social responsibility by fostering public-private partnerships focused on global education. In 2018, the digital platform launched as an online database to directly connect businesses with opportunities to support education in emergencies. Since then, dozens of companies and foundations have supported civil society organizations to ensure students who have faced crisis or natural disasters can return to school and learn. 

 

What’s New

To date, REACT has already impacted the lives of 15,000 children. The new version of the REACT website is set to impact thousands more by making it even easier for businesses and organizations to work together to deliver education in emergencies. The new website now:

  1. Maps educational challenges and opportunities around the world submitted by implementation partners delivering education in emergencies – such as school supply requests, digital infrastructure needs, and curricula.  
  2. Matches resources from the business community – including financial aid, technical expertise, employee volunteers, training, and in-kind goods and services – to rlocal needs.
  3. Directs business resources and assets, facilitates partnerships, and creates, accelerates, and disseminates new education solutions at scale.

For companies or foundations that seek to start projects or programs in support of education in emergencies, REACT now allows any representative to browse unmet education needs by country, category, and requesting organization. This new browsing function makes contributing resources towards unmet needs as simple as a click of a button. The platform also allows businesses to catalog resources and assets not yet requested that may particularly impactful for students and their education in the case of an emergency. 

Similarly, the new REACT platform allows implementation partners to submit a resource request to receive support for their on-the-ground education delivery work in just a matter of minutes. 

Signup is quick and simple, and you can log in anytime to browse new submissions. The upgraded platform now uses a hashtag indexing system to automatically suggest potential partnerships, which are then vetted by the REACT administrators. Once a match is confirmed, both parties are connected and the REACT team helps facilitate and support the ongoing partnership. 

 

What’s Urgent

Today, REACT is prioritizing corporate support for our partner Education Cannot Wait – a global fund for education in emergencies. We are actively seeking business support for programs in alignment with the first-response and multi-year plans in three ECW priority countries: Uganda, Lebanon, and Bangladesh.

You can view the current educational challenges and unmet needs now-react.org/urgentneeds. 

In addition to these three priority countries, we are also expanding our reach to Greece. We are working to partner with UNHCR, UNICEF, and other organizations in Greece to channel support from the business community for children whose education has been disrupted by conflict and forced migration. 

During our team’s visit to the Aegean island last week, we learned that more than three-quarters of the 4,656 school-aged children on the Greek islands who are asylum seekers and live in reception centers do not attend school. We also met with more than 30 representatives from Greek civil society organizations in need of additional support to deliver education to these children and youth, many of them unaccompanied. 

By working with these organizations, we will be identifying critical challenges and resource gaps on the ground and helping them log the requests on the REACT platform to draw support from businesses interested in contributing. 

If your organization is interested in supporting education for refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, or in any of the ECW priority countries, please contact the REACT project manager, Jake Cho. 

Or, begin supporting education in emergencies by taking 5 minutes to sign up your company or organization for REACT.