A note I wrote to UNICEF in New York after seeing that UNICEF claimed to have invented the School in a Box in 1994 - in Tanzania!

I have just recently seen the News Note: UNICEF celebrates 60 years for children where the following sentence occurs:

‘Returning hundreds of thousands of children affected by armed conflict and natural disaster to school, thanks to the invention of UNICEF’s school in a box’.

It is important to put on record that this is not true. The Sudan Open Learning organisation was probably the first organisation to create such a kit for emergencies for the Southern Sudanese in displacement camps, whose temporary schools were being knocked down by the authorities every so often. The name ‘School in a Box’ and the kit itself were used in Khartoum from 1988. This is well attested.

UNESCO-PEER learned about the kit and the name there in 1990, and UNICEF came later. The Norwegian Refugee Council also had a huge role to play in developing the kit concept.
In the UNHCR education workshop in Nairobi UNICEF/UNESCO-PEER/UNHCR displayed the Teacher Emergency package together – this was put together for Rwanda after the genocide.
In the evaluation I did of UNICEF’s education programmes in Somalia in 1995 the school kit is referred to, as being done in collaboration with UNESCO-PEER.
I worked in UNICEF on the Zambian version (Zedukit) in 1997 – at that time everyone in UNICEF knew that the School in a box was not a new concept. In the Zedukit we added the concept of a very comprehensive teacher training manual (the Spark manual –still going strong I believe)

UNICEF most definitely did not invent the School in a Box, and should not claim that it did! It is simpler and more accurate to say that UNICEF ‘further developed and greatly expanded the use of’ … It sounds better, anyway.

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In a similar way it is to be noted that in the Jesuit Refugee Service 25th anniversary book they claim to have set up the Foundation course in Khartoum, when in fact it was provided for them by the Sudan Open Learning Unit which I headed at the time.