Six years after its brutal civil war drew to a close, Liberia is struggling to pick up the pieces. Ghostly shells overlook the capital Monrovia, an ever-present reminder of nearly 14 years of conflict that saw the almost total collapse of infrastructure. The country’s youth were worst affected, many were killed, many were orphaned and many were recruited as child soldiers, losing childhood forever. The education system, too, collapsed as various rebel groups swept through the country often targeting schools for recruits. Almost every child in every classroom has missed out on years of learning and now they’re desperately trying to catch up.
Implementing free universal primary education in Liberia comes with its own challenges. While Liberia is on the right track, it will require huge amounts of time, effort and investment. And it is only through education that the youth of Liberia will be able to lift themselves out of their poverty to rebuild their country.
In a YouTube clip, Katy Webley, head of education at Save the Children, spells out the lessons that her organisation has learned from its Rewrite the Future campaign, including the message that “Education must become part of emergency responses, alongside food, nutrition, health and shelter.”
Decades of conflict in Chad have left children and youth vulnerable to recruitment by armed forces and rebel groups - leading to an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 child soldiers in the country. In this video, UNICEF’s Salma Zulfiqar reports on the demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration of former child soldiers in Chad.
For five years, young Emmanuel Jal fought as a child soldier in the Sudan. Rescued by an aid worker, he’s become an international hip-hop star and an activist for kids in war zones. In words and lyrics, he tells the story of his amazing life.
Former child soldiers Ishamel Beah,Grace Akallo and Kon Kelei speak to moderator Amy Costello. All three have lived through and participated in conflict in their native countries of Sierra Leone, Uganda and Sudan. They share not only common experiences as former child soldiers, but also agree that it was education that enabled them to become the writers and advocates they are today.
This podcast has been provided by UNICEF. Please refer to their website for further information.
Resource Highlights High Hopes, Grim Reality: Reintegration and the Education of Former Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone. The complexity of providing education to former child soldiers in Sierra Leone and the potential challenges that may be associated with their return to school remain unexplored in the research. This study aims to fill this gap and presents the perspectives of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, their caregivers, and community members speaking to the role of education in their psychosocial adjustment and community reintegration following the end of the civil war. Theresa S. Betancourt, et al, 2008.
The village of Santa Paz in Southern Leyte, Philippines is prone to floods and landslides. The school is situated in a particularly dangerous area and could be swept away by a landslide following a tropical storm. Plan’s Disaster Risk Reduction programme assessed the school and initially built a trench and concrete barrier to protect it. However, the schools situation makes it vulnerable and only by moving it to a different location can the children be properly protected.
Resource Highlights Children on the Frontline: Children and Young People in Disaster Risk Reduction. Plan and World Vision argue that children, who represent 50% of the world’s population, can and do play invaluable roles in planning and implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation activities. In spite of this evidence, children are, by and large, excluded from the activities that contribute to building the resilience of their local communities. Children must be engaged as a vital part of the civil society mechanism that monitors Hygo Framework for Action progress. World Vision and PLAN International, 2009.
Some 175 million children are likely to be affected by climate-related disasters each year, according to Save the Children. Amy Costello speaks to UNICEF’s Antony Spalton, UNICEF Disaster Risk Reduction Specialist, and Rhee, a 16-year-old boy from the Philippines about the role of children in protecting their communities from natural disasters.
This video shows Sahar Adish, a resettled Afghan refugee, who talks of the power of a girl’s education. Sahar is now a 19 year-old pre-med student at the University of Virginia and recently received a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for a film she helped to make telling her family’s heroic story of escape from the Taliban. On November 7, 2007 Sahar inspired a crowd of over 750 guests at the IRC’s Freedom Award dinner, which officially kicked off a year-long celebration of the IRC’s 75th anniversary.
Resource Highlights Educating Girls and Empowering Women: Gender and Post-Conflict Educational Reform in Afghanistan. Increasing access to school for girls is an important first step in making a society more equitable; this paper argues for the need to go beyond access alone to explore the role of education in actually improving the status of girls and women in the war-torn nation of Afghanistan. This paper was a finalist in the Jackie Kirk Commemorative Competition 2009. Jamie Vinson, 2009
Click here to visit the INEE Gender Task Team webpage. Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you are interested in learning how to get involved.
An estimated 100 million girls around the world are involved in child labour, according to the ILO. Chief Technical Adviser, the International Labour Organisation’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), Patrick Quinn; Professor Managing Director of the Sindh Education Foundation, Anita Ghulam Ali; and child labour activist Kailash Sityarthi discuss the importance of educating girls in the struggle to eliminate child labour.
This podcast has been provided by UNICEF. Please refer to their website for further information.
Resource Highlights Education in Emergencies: The Gender Implications. It is critical to establish gender-responsive education programs throughout the emergency relief to development continuum. Not only do girls and boys, women and men, experience conflict and natural disasters differently, but these crises contexts can also provide opportunities for systemic change that can increase gender equity within communities and national systems as they recover and rebuild. This Advocacy Brief lays out the supply and demand factors that influence educational opportunties for girls and boys in emergency contexts. It also provides an overview of guidelines, strategies and programmatic approaches to support practitioners and policy makers working to ensure gender-responsive education. UNESCO, 2006
Getting Girls Out of Work and Into School. In the Asia-Pacific region, girls’ labour, official and unofficial, continues to constitute a major obstacle to accelerating progress towards achieving gender parity and equality in primary and secondary education by 2015. This policy brief summarises the causes and consequences of girls’ child labour on their educational opportunities and describes some of the instruments and strategies in place to reduce girls’ labour. UNESCO, 2006
Click here to visit the INEE Gender Task Team webpage. Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you are interested in learning how to get involved.
This video from Teacher’s TV, shows how events occurring outside of the two West Bank schools can have a huge impact on the lives of both teachers and pupils. One month into an already stressful term and the two schools, King Talal boys’ school and Hajja Rushda girls’ school, are having to deal with the day-to-day realities of living under an occupation while attempting to teach and learn. A raid by the Israeli army on a nearby refugee camp brings chaos to the schools as well as tragedy for one of the students.
Resource Highlight Creating Healing Classrooms: Guide for Teachers and Teacher Educators. The importance of teacher training and support for restoring nurturing developmental opportunities cannot be overstated. With the protection and psychosocial needs of children in mind, trained teachers can communicate critical lifesaving messages, model caring adult behavior and help reestablish children’s trust; they have the potential to create a climate in the classroom that helps children heal. IRC, 2006
Moderator Amy Costello talks with guests Sibeso Luswata, UNICEF Southern Sudan Chief of Education; Paul Martin, UNICEF Representative in Colombia; and Geeta Verma, UNICEF Deputy Representative in Iraq about the role of education in countries affected by conflict or emerging from it.
This podcast has been provided by UNICEF. Please refer to their website for further information.
Resource Highlights
Education Under Attack: 2010. This UNESCO publication, the second global report on the subject, was released on February 2010. The first report from 2007 was seminal in drawing attention to this crime against international humanitarian and human rights law. The new report documents the trends of attacks since 2007, highlighting a tragic rise in violent attacks over the past few years. UNESCO, 2010
Protecting Education from Attack: A State-of-the-Art Review. This accompanying publication to the 2010 edition of Education under Attack presents key discussion points and 13 papers written by researchers and practitioners active in the field of protecting education from attack. UNESCO, 2010
This is the second film of a series of four, focusing on the impact which Rewrite the Future, Save the Children’s first global campaign has had on children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rewrite the Future was launched two years ago with the aim of securing the right to education of children affected by armed conflict. Today, 37 million children are missing out on school in countries affected by armed conflict, more than half of all the children out of school worldwide. Save the Children launched Rewrite the Future to open peoples’ eyes to the needs and rights of children living with the effects of war and conflict. To make a direct difference to 8 million children’s lives by improving their quality of education getting 3 million of these children into school who weren’t before. To persuade governments and international organisations to mobilise resources and provide education themselves.
Resource Highlight Rewrite the Future: Education for Children in Conflict-affected Countries This document provides an overview of the issues facing those working to ensure children affected by crisis have access to educational opportunities, and was released at the begining of the Rewrite the Futures Campaign in 2006. An updated Save the Children Education in Emergencies Rewrite the Future Brief from 2009 is here.
Moderator Amy Costello talks with guests Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, and Gene Sperling, a Senior Fellow for Economic Studies and Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations, about education as a human right and long-term development tool.
This podcast has been provided by UNICEF. Please refer to their website for further information.
Resource Highlight The INEE Minimum Standards are the foundational tool for practitioners and policymakers working to provide education to children and youth affected by crisis. They provide good practices and concrete guidance to governments and humanitarian workers for coordinated action to enhance the quality of education preparedness and response, increase access to safe and relevant learning opportunities, and ensure accountability in providing these services. They are being used in over 80 countries around the world to improve programme and policy planning, assessment, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation as well as advocacy and preparedness in order to reach the Education for All goals. The INEE Minimum Standards Handbook is available online here, with over twenty translations here.
In the past ten years, Afghanistan has made enormous progress. Schools have reopened and young people stream into classrooms. Afghanistan continues to work hard to remove barriers to learning, resolved to improve opportunities for its children to fulfill their potential.
Joyce Wanican, the International Rescue Committee’s education program manager in northern Uganda, shares her story: She was working with the IRC, training teachers at a refugee camp when rebel troops came through. She lost her home and all her posessions. All her students fled with their families—and almost had to miss the all-important national exams. But Joyce wouldn’t let that happen. She successfully appealed to the government of Uganda to reschedule the test. She found all her students at another refugee camp, 65 miles away, and asked them to go back to school the next morning and start studying. “Every big tree in the camp became a classroom,” she said. “We had no time to waste.” Despite everything, Joyce’s students’ exams came back with the “best results ever.”
The INEE Global Consultation 2009 kicked off yesterday with video presentations to the 270 delegates from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and comments from Dr Arslan, Deputy Undersecretary from the Ministry of Education in Turkey, and the Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth Secretariat Ms Masire-Mwamba.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf spoke of her countries work since the end of conflict, the challenges of meeting the Millennium Development Goals and the importance of flexible and sufficient funding for education:
Archbishop Tutu’s address emphasized the importance of education in emergencies, particularly the crucial role that education can play in contributing to peace and justice.
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