Right before the Transforming Education Summit, which took place in New York (the US) on September 19, Director of the UN's Education Cannot Wait (ECW) fund Yasmine Sherif emphasised that in crisis areas, children have lost everything, and on top of that, they have lost their access to a quality education.
The organisation's statistics show that, of the approximately 222 million children around the world have seen their education disrupted by conflict or climate-related disasters, including nearly 80 million who never set foot in school. From Pakistan to Ukraine to Venezuela to vast stretches of sub-Saharan Africa, rising crises and climate disasters are placing an added toll on the most vulnerable — children deprived of school.
The lack of education has real and immediate consequences. Children sometimes end up on the streets, facing threats of violence, human trafficking, recruitment by armed groups, or for girls, forced marriage. Recently, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) criticized the high rate of child labour in Africa, amid a vicious cycle of poverty and violence spreading in the region. Of the 160 million children involved in child labour globally, 92 million are recorded in Africa. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the closure of schools, is a factor that has aggravated the situation of child labour.
Remarkably, inequality in education is increasingly revealing and derails the goals of global education coverage. According to the UN, while some European nations spend 10,000USD per year on educating a child, children in conflict zones receive around 150 USD each, showing a relatively large gap.
Even in the UK, the country’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned that inequality in education could cause millions of children in the country to be disadvantaged. Accordingly, the disadvantaged pupils start school behind their better-off peers, and the current education system has not been able to close this gap.
In conflict countries, schools which should have been a healthy environment for children to learn and develop skills are destroyed or even turned into arsenals. Statistics from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) show that, since 2005, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions with the highest number of verified attacks on schools and hospitals, with 22 such attacks in the first six months of this year alone. Children in conflict zones suffer terrible fears every day. In 2020, weapons and explosive remnants of war were responsible for almost 50 per cent of all child casualties, resulting in more than 3,900 children killed and maimed.
ECW Director Yasmine Sherif calls for a global commitment to meet the urgent educational needs of crisis-affected children. Since 2016, the ECW has raised more than $1 billion towards building schools and buying educational materials as well as providing daily meals and offering psychological services. Meanwhile, UNICEF is calling on governments to commit to providing quality education to all children — urging for new efforts and investment to re-enrol and retain all children in school, to increase access to remedial and catch-up learning, to support teachers and give them the tools they need, and to make sure that schools provide a safe and supportive environment so all children are ready to learn.
In any crisis, children are vulnerable. The temporary closure of schools due to the COVID-19 epidemic along with an increase in violence against children provides a clear example. The time has come for the entire world to push for more radical and substantive action to deliver quality education to every child, with UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell emphasising that: "With the learning of an entire generation of children at risk, this is not the time for empty promises.".
