The crisis in global education and the push to raise money for children affected by conflict and climate change were among the key issues on the sidelines of the UN’s annual meeting of world leaders this week. Campaigners said more than 500 million children are in desperate need of education, even as some new funding commitments were announced.
Maysa Jalbout, director of Education Cannot Wait, said the scale of the challenge was evident during a recent visit to Sudan. In a sixth-grade classroom with 120 children, she met an 18-year-old girl displaced by fighting three years ago, forced into marriage and motherhood early, but still determined to complete her education. Even in a classroom with a temperature of 44 degrees Celsius and no water or electricity, Jalbout said, “She pleaded with me to make sure that her siblings and her cousins and her orphan friends are also able to attend school.”
Jalbout said the school was so small that hundreds of other children waiting outside could not get in. They asked her and other visitors to carry a message to build more schools, and she said that is what she has been urging at the UN this week.
Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister who is now the UN special envoy for global education, said on Thursday that 273 million children are out of school and another 270 million are in school but are not learning enough to read and write or become proficient in arithmetic by the age of 11. Many of them live in areas hit by conflict or climate change, he said. “The message, I think, is clear,” Brown said. “Instead of the world developing only some of the potential of some children in some countries, we must be determined to develop the potential of all children at all times in every country.”
Brown said governments whose children are not in school must be reminded that they had promised to spend 20 per cent of their budgets on education. He also said donor countries should be reminded that, in 2015, they signed up to UN development goals that include quality education for all children by 2030. “We’re so far away from the goal,” he said. Calling the lack of progress disappointing, Brown added: “If you deny a child the basic right to education, you are doing something that will affect their whole life and, indeed, the life of the family around them.”
Even so, the gathering of world leaders produced some results. At an event on Wednesday, the Global Partnership for Education said USD 3.5 billion had been mobilised from partners and funds to support more than 90 lower-income countries in improving their education systems and providing quality learning. It said USD 2.1 billion came from confirmed and expected pledges from governments and private donors, while USD 1.4 billion came in co-financing, including USD 1 billion from development finance institutions and USD 400 million from a coalition of philanthropic and private sector partners.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who co-hosted the campaign, said the funding would help “dynamic and youthful nations like Nigeria to break down the barriers that keep our children, especially our girls, out of school and away from learning, so they can achieve their full potential.”
Education Cannot Wait focuses on the 258 million school-age children worldwide affected by crises, a number Jalbout said is “far greater than the number that we are able to reach”. She announced a USD 3 million emergency investment for children in Gaza and the West Bank to support up to 13,000 of the most vulnerable children and adolescents, with priority for those with conflict-related injuries and disabilities, and for children who have lost parents or are unaccompanied or separated. Jalbout said Gaza now has more child amputees per capita than anywhere in the world. “For these children,” she said, “survival is only the beginning – a child who has survived this war, lost a limb and perhaps lost their family should not also lose their future because we failed to organise around their needs.”
She said the needs remain far greater than the available funds. For the third year in a row, 660,000 children in Gaza remain out of school, and about 70,000 younger children have no access to pre-school. Elsewhere, she said, the organisation had provided USD 1 million to help children affected by Nepal’s recent devastating floods return to learning. During her Sudan visit, she announced USD 22 million in funding to help several hundred thousand children, but said 8 million young people there are still out of school. The appeals made at the UN this week underscored both the scale of the global education crisis and the effort to direct money to children most affected by war, climate shocks and displacement.
With PTI Inputs
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