Education urgently needed for 28.5 million school age children

 

Urgent action is needed to bring education to the 28.5 million primary school age children out of school in the world’s conflict zones.

UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2011 brought to focus the hidden crisis of education in conflict-affected countries. Two years later a new paper (Policy Paper 10, July 2013) titled Children still battling to go to school by UNESCO’s EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that half of the 57 million children out of school live in conflict-affected countries.

Released in partnership with Save the Children to mark the 16th birthday on 12 July of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban on her way home from school in October 2012, the paper shows that urgent action is needed to bring education to the 28.5 million primary school age children out of school in the world’s conflict zones.

The paper states:

Education seldom figures in assessments of the damage inflicted by conflict. International attention and the media invariably focus on the most immediate images of humanitarian suffering, not on the hidden costs and lasting legacies of violence.

Yet nowhere are those costs and legacies more evident than in education.

Across many of the world’s poorest countries, armed conflict continues to destroy not just school infrastructure, but also the hopes and ambitions of a whole generation of children.

Globally, the number of children out of school has fallen, from 60 million in 2008 to 57 million in 2011. But the benefits of this progress have not reached children in conflict-affected countries.

These children make up 22% of the world’s primary school aged population, yet they comprise 50% of children who are denied an education, a proportion that has increased from 42% in 2008 .Of the 28.5 million primary school age children out of school in conflict-affected countries, 12.6 million live in sub-Saharan Africa, 5.3 million live in South and West Asia, and 4 million live in the Arab States. The vast majority – 95% –lives in low and lower middle income countries.(Figure 1)

Girls, who make up 55% of the total, are the worst affected, as they are often victims of rape and other sexual violence that accompanies armed conflicts.

Of the 69 million adolescents of lower secondary school age who were not in school, 20 million lived in conflict-affected countries in 2011, of whom 11million were female.

 

“Across many of the world’s poorest countries, armed conflict continues to destroy not just school infrastructure, but also the hopes and ambitions of a whole generation of children,” UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova said.

 

The EFA Global Monitoring Report team drew on the same international reporting systems as used for its 2011 report to construct an updated list of conflict-affected countries.

Thirty-two countries were identified as affected by armed conflict in the period 2002–2011. However, new countries have joined the list, such as Libya, Mali and Syria.

Many countries embroiled in conflict are overlooked in the international aid structure, with their education systems receiving neither long-term development assistance nor short-term humanitarian aid. The global education community has been calling for 4% of humanitarian aid to be allocated to education. Yet new analysis by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team shows that the share of humanitarian aid for education has declined. In 2012, education accounted for just 1.4% of humanitarian aid, down from 2.2% in 2009. (Figure2)

This decline in humanitarian aid for education is especially unfortunate because funds are needed more than ever. Humanitarian crises are escalating in several parts of the world. There were 15.4 million refugees by the end of 2012 – more than there have been since 1994 (UNHCR 2013).

The majority of refugees flee to neighbouring developing countries, whose education systems are already weak and face limited capacity to support new populations.

For every refugee, there are two internally displaced people, who are often even less protected. Children make up 46% of those who have been forcibly displaced. These girls and boys face a disruption of their learning process at a critical time – and the risk of a lifetime of disadvantage as a result.

Governments identified conflict as a major barrier towards getting all children into school when they signed the Dakar Framework for Action in 2000. (http://www.unesco.org/education/wef/en-leadup/dakfram.shtm)They recognized that children in conflict-affected countries are robbed of an education not only because schools may be closed and teachers absent, but also because they are exposed to widespread rape and other sexual violence, targeted attacks on schools and other abuses.

Almost 50 million children living in conflict-affected countries around the world are being denied the chance of going to school whilst the number of reported attacks on education is rising.

Save the Children is calling on world leaders to tackle this crisis, committing to the following:

• Protect education by criminalising attacks on education, prohibiting the use of schools by armed groups and by working with schools and communities to adopt local measures to preserve schools as centres for learning –especially in a conflict.
• Cover the funding gap by increasing the current levels of humanitarian funding to education and progressively work towards reaching a minimum of 4% of global humanitarian funding.

 Read more here: http://www.savethechildren.net/malala-day

The crisis of education in conflict is no longer hidden hence there is no excuse for not helping to bring it to an end.

Source: UNESCO, UNHCR, Save the Children

Thanks to Meetika Srivastava