The United Nations Correspondent

Game-changer finance facility launched to keep children in classrooms

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Students at the “25 de Junho” School located in Beira, Mozambique. The school is currently hosting around 5,000 children ranging in ages from five to 14. Organized in three shifts, starting at 6 am, the students fill classrooms which take up to 90 students. Part of the school was built by the community and completed last year. During the cyclones windows were broken and most of the tin roofs flew off, except for some parts that now hang in pieces over the students. This photograph is part of a series of images made in the days leading up to the arrival of Secretary-General António Guterres in Mozambique. Mr. Guterres visited the country to take stock of the recovery efforts in the areas impacted by cyclones Idai and Kenneth, which hit just a few weeks apart in March and April 2019. More than 600 people perished during Idai alone; the effects of the two cyclones combined left approximately 2.2 million people in need of assistance. The United Nations and its humanitarian partners have since been on the ground supporting the Government’s efforts - assisting through contributing to the coordination of international support, distributing food, drinking water and medicine, and providing shelter to those displaced.

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.”

Read more in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4

(By J. Tuyet Nguyen)

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