Education

UPDATE: U.N. chief calls on Taliban to reverse “outrageous” education ban

New York, January 24 – This year’s International Day of Education has raised a deep concern that more than 5 million children have been shutout of schools in the ongoing war in Ukraine while Taliban authorities in Afghanistan have forbidden girls and women to receive education, U.N. agencies said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that education is a “fundamental human right and the bedrock of societies, economies, and every person’s potential.”

“Now is also the time to end all discriminatory laws and practices that hinder access to education. I call on the de facto authorities in Afghanistan in particular to reverse the outrageous and self-defeating ban on access to secondary and higher education for girls,” he said.

Guterres reminded the 130 countries that last September committed themselves to transform education and ensure that universal quality education will become a “central pillar of public policies and investments.”

“Now is the time for all countries to translate their Summit commitments into concrete actions that create supportive and inclusive learning environments for all students,” he said.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said the war triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has compounded the loss of education caused by Covid-19 pandemic in the last three years. Many of the Ukrainian boys and girls have missed schools in eastern Ukraine since the Crimea crisis in 2014.

“Schools and early childhood education settings provide a crucial sense of structure and safety to children, and missing out on learning could have lifelong consequences,” said Afshan Khan, UNICEF Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia. “There is no pause button. It is not an option to simply postpone children’s education and come back to it once other priorities have been addressed, without risking the future of an entire generation.”

Khan said thousands of schools, pre-schools or other education facilities in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed by explosives and parents were reluctant to send children to schools out of safety concerns.

“UNICEF will continue working with the Government of Ukraine and the host countries’ Governments to deliver solutions to help children in conflict areas and those who have been displaced from their homes to continue their education,” said Khan.

Read UNICEF’s appeal on the International Day of Education

UNESCO: 2.5 million Afghan girls and women barred from schools

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said the Taliban government ordered last December that 80 per cent of school-aged Afghan girls and women, a total of 2.5 million, cannot attend schools. The order included more than 100,000 women who were attending government and private institutions.

UNESCO, the Paris-based U.N. agency, said it has dedicated this year’s edition of the International Day of Education to the women and girls of Afghanistan, “who have been deprived of their fundamental right to education in the wake of the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

Barring girls and young women from classrooms in Afghanistan could wipe out huge gains made in education and create “a lost generation”, the UN’s educational and cultural organization, UNESCO, has warned. (Sources: UN News)

“No country in the world should bar women and girls from receiving an education. Education is a universal human right that must be respected,” said Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “The international community has the responsibility to ensure that the rights of Afghan girls and women are restored without delay. The war against women must stop.”

Taliban authorities last month banned young women from universities following an earlier directive prohibiting girls from attending secondary school, issued mere months after the fundamentalist group, who ruled in the late 1990s up to 2001, regained power in August 2021, sweeping back into the capital of Kabul.

UNESCO said Afghanistan recorded a tenfold increase in enrollment across all education levels, from roughly one million to 10 million students between 2001 and 2018. The number of girls in primary school increased from almost zero to 2.5 million. By August 2021, they accounted for four out of 10 primary school students. Women’s presence in higher education also increased almost 20 fold, from 5,000 students in 2001 to over 100,000 two decades later. Today, 80 per cent of school-aged Afghan girls and women, 2.5 million, are out of school. The order suspending university education for women, announced in December, affects more than 100,000 attending government and private institutions.

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UPDATE: U.N. chief calls on Taliban to reverse “outrageous” education ban Read More »

Game-changer finance facility launched to keep children in classrooms

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New York, September 18 – The recent massive floods in Pakistan have destroyed 23,700 schools and damaged 22,000 others and the impact on the lives and education of millions of children in the country will take years to repair, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the United Nations Transforming Education Summit.

Sharif announced the shocking news of climate disasters at the three-day summit ending on September 19 to launch the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd). But war, economic woes and the Covid-19 pandemic in the past 2-1/2 years have closed schools and universities worldwide and interrupted education of hundreds of millions of youths.

“The impact on the lives and minds of millions of our children and youth will be felt for years to come,” Sharif said. “As we work to rebuild from this catastrophe, the new stream of affordable education financing from IFFEd will be crucial to help meet our financing needs to provide an inclusive and quality education for our most vulnerable children and youth.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the UN special envoy on education, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, launched IFFEd during the summit at the UN General Assembly session in New York in partnership with the governments of Sweden, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank.

The facility has $2 billion to spend on education projects in Asia and Africa starting in 2023. The UN said it could unlock an extra $10 billion of additional financing for education and skills by 2030.

“Education is the building block for peaceful, prosperous, stable societies,” Guterres said, urging rich countries to support the program on education. “Reducing investment virtually guarantees more serious crises further down the line. We need to get more, not less, money into education systems.”

The UN said the finance facility is the first of its kind to support education in lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), home to 700 million children and youths and where one in five children is out of school.

“Global education is in crisis” – World leaders signed an open letter to support IFFEd.

The open letter said the global education is in crisis and 80 per cent of the nearly 300 million children out of school live in low-income countries. It said 800 million young people will leave school without any qualifications.

“Recent data shows that global learning poverty in low- and middle-income countries is estimated to have risen to 70 per cent, with more than half of the world’s children unable to read or write a simple text at the age of 10 and no accredited skills for the workplace when they leave school.”

“Coupled with the ‘violation’ of children’s right to education evidenced by these high levels of learning poverty, the latter is bound to have a devastating impact on future productivity, earnings, and well-being for this generation of children and youth, their families, and the world’s economy.”

Education is Sustainable Development Goal 4

There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which the UN hopes but fears that many of them could not be achieved by the year 2030. Goal 4 calls for ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all.”

(By J. Tuyet Nguyen)

Game-changer finance facility launched to keep children in classrooms Read More »

UN: Rich countries secure $10 trillion to fight the virus while fragile, poor countries are struggling with much less resources

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New York, September 9 – Rich countries have adopted economic stimulus packages worth more than $10 trillion to protect their own populations from the coronavirus while the weakest and poorest countries in the world with much less financial resources are those that will be the worst affected by the virus, a United Nations official warned the UN Security Council in a meeting to review the global efforts against the pandemic.

“The G20 and OECD countries have, rightly, adopted domestic economic stimulus measures amounting to more than $10 trillion to protect their own populations from the worst effects of the pandemic and lockdown. That amounts to more than 10 per cent of global income,” said Mark Lowcock, the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. He referred to the world’s 20 largest economies and banking institutions and high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“Low income and fragile countries do not have the resources, capacity or access to markets to do the same thing. So they are reliant on support from elsewhere, especially the international financial institutions.”

Lowcock said of the $143 billion promised by the international financial institutions only 7 per cent so far have been committed to low income countries, representing little more than 2 per cent of their combined GDPs.

“To speak plainly, woefully inadequate economic and political action (to support poor countries) will lead to greater instability and conflicts in the coming years. More crises will be on this Security Council’s agenda,” Lowcock said. “The burden of my advice to you today is that while we may have been surprised by the virus, we cannot say the same of the security and humanitarian crises that most certainly lay ahead if we don’t change course.”

Lowcock began his briefing to the 15-nation council by saying that there are now growing reasons to believe that in the medium and longer term the “weakest, most fragile and conflict-affected countries will be those worst affected by COVID-19.”

“The virus is everywhere,” he said, pointing out that there are now more than 26 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and more than 860,000 deaths with roughly a third of the cases and deaths are in countries affected by humanitarian or refugee crisis or those with high levels of vulnerability.

The full extent of the pandemic remains unknown while testing levels are very low and those infected by the virus may be reluctant to seek help to avoid being quarantined or they do not trust the medical services offered to them, he said.

The UN has raised around $2.4 billion since March when its first launched an appeal for funds to fight the coronavirus from generous donors and is now seeking $10 billion to cover activities in the coming six months to support 250 million people in 63 countries, Lowcock said.

He said the money already received was meant to assist poor countries as well as to provide personal protective equipment, including masks, gloves and gowns to 730,000 health workers; information on the virus and how to protect yourself from it to more than a billion people in nearly 60 countries; to reach nearly 100 million children with distance learning and provide tens of millions of people with soap, detergent and other improvements to water and sanitation systems.

Lowcock said the indirect effects of Covid-19 are mostly on the global economy but the most fragile economies are hit harder by weakened commodity prices, declining remittances and trade disruptions. Covid-19 also hurt public services, especially health and education across the world but the impacts are harder for poor countries. He said any reduction in the availability of basic health services would hurt poor countries more, citing immunization and food security as two obvious examples.

UPDATE: U.N. chief calls on Taliban to reverse “outrageous” education ban

Game-changer finance facility launched to keep children in classrooms

UN: Rich countries secure $10 trillion to fight the virus while fragile, poor countries are struggling with much less resources

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