UNESCO says $2.3bn needed to send 34m children, adolescents to school

A UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report says 2.3 billion dollars is needed to send to school the 34 million children and adolescents of conflict–affected countries who are currently not attending educational institutions.

According to the ‘Education for All Global Monitoring Report”, released by the UN agency on Monday, the amount is ten times the amount being received from humanitarian aid now.

The report was developed by an independent team and published by UNESCO.

According to the report, 34 million children and adolescents were out of school in conflict-affected countries.

It added that the most vulnerable were the hardest hit and the poorest were twice as likely to be out of school as their counterparts in peaceful countries.

The report showed that in 2014, education received only two per cent of humanitarian aid.

It indicated that only a third of countries had reached global education goals set in 2000, and identified conflict as one of the major barriers to achieving better results.

It added that Children in conflict-affected countries are more than twice as likely, and adolescents two-thirds more likely, to be out of school than in non-conflict affected countries.

The report noted that young women were almost 90 per cent more likely to be out of secondary school in conflict affected-countries than elsewhere.

It stated that media attention unfairly prioritised some countries over others, saying more than half of available humanitarian aid to education was allocated to just 15 out of 342 appeals between 2000 and 2014.

It proposed a new, evidence-based finance target, and made recommendations for tightening the current aid structure for education in crises.

The report said any new global emergency education fund should ensure that resources for education in crises were additional, flexible and predictable.

It would be recalled that UN Education Envoy, Gordon Brown, had described year 2015 as worst year since 1945 for children seeing their schools attacked and the worst year for children becoming refugees.

Brown mentioned the rising numbers of girls and boys at risk from conflict in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Burundi, South Sudan, northern Nigerian and from natural disasters in Nepal.

He outlined illustrative statistics, including the fact that over half of the world’s record 38 million internally displaced persons are children, and that a similar portion of the world’s 16.7 million refugees are children.

In addition, he said over 825,000 children are trafficked each year, with 8.6 million in slavery, an estimated five million girls married off before the age of 15 last year, and about 168 million child labourers, 85 million of whom were engaged in hazardous work.

“We expect the figure to rise as in crisis zone after crisis zone even school age children who were once at school are being forced into child labour.

“Today in some of the world’s most troubled spots it is open season for traffickers, with girls snatched from the streets in Nepal to adolescents forced into marriage in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.’’

NAN