Education on a war-footing

Consider these shocking facts…

57 million children in the world are out of schools.

In Congo, 31 per cent of school-age children have never set foot in a classroom, and 7 million are out of schools.

In our own Rajasthan, 40 per cent of girls drop out before the 5th grade. Only one in 100 girls in rural India completes 12th grade.

40 per cent of Syrians in grade 1-9 are now refugees. Two million Syrian children have dropped out of schools. In Lebanon alone, there will be half a million Syrian children living as refugees by end-2013.

At a global education meet in Doha last week, over three days I got some valuable education… as I gingerly dodged (in the documentaries shown at the event) barbed wires to observe schools destroyed and devastated in conflict zones, sending the children fleeing for their lives. Through stinking roads buzzing with flies, past piled-up garbage and overflowing sewers, into cramped rooms in which children huddled with scribbling pads and textbooks in hand — smiling through their stinking environs, because the books they gripped held out hope of a much better future.  

Thanks to the deep involvement of arguably the most influential person in Qatar, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser (mother of the current Emir), who is passionate about education, the annual WISE (World Innovation Summit in Education) held out a ray of hope for a good section of the 57 million children in the world who are outside schools.

Chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, which organises WISE every year, Sheikha Moza has been a global style and fashion icon, but the tall and beautiful woman is much more than that. In 2003, she was appointed Unesco’s Special Envoy for Basic and Higher Education, and in 2010 she became a member of the UN Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group with emphasis on universal primary education.

We were at the fifth WISE event, where former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Ministers of Education from several countries, Unesco’s Director General Irina Bokova, Unicef’s Executive Director Anthony Lake, vice-chancellors from prominent global universities, and a host of other VIPs, social scientists and non-profit organisation chiefs rubbed shoulders with 1,500 delegates and 100-odd international journalists. The burden of the song at the various packed sessions was new and innovative ways to reach kids who are out of schools.

Forgotten, neglected

So how could the forgotten and the neglected, the hardest to find and reach, be given quality education? At the session titled ‘Educating at the extreme’, in a moving video clip which had commentary by Meryl Streep, it was heart-warming to see children from diverse backgrounds express their dreams and desires… to become a surgeon, an engineer, a journalist, a teacher, an electrician, a doctor...

Last year at WISE, Sheikha Moza announced another initiative — Educate a child — whose objective is to get 10 million children into schools by 2015-end. Paying her a glowing tribute for already reaching primary education to 2 million children, Gordon Brown said sometimes you meet people “so extraordinary that they change your view of the possible… there isn’t any example in the history of the world where a single person has done so much for education.”

But as various speakers pointed out, the challenge was huge; universal primary education by 2015 was one of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals and a guaranteed human right. Barely 800 days remain.

According to Unesco figures, a lot of progress has been made in Asia, but little in Africa, where the largest number of out-of-school children live. The $1.9 billion currently allocated each year to basic education in low-income countries is “a pittance; less than 10 per cent of what is actually required”. In this bleak scenario, commented Brown, many donor agencies had gone back on the funds promised, “which is unacceptable” but luckily new partners had come in.

Stunted soch (thinking)

Hidden in this number, hidden in the “extreme challenges of geography, deprivation, violence and cultural taboos, are stories of families living at the edge; stories of hardships difficult to imagine… among sewerage and rubbish, the world of drug trafficking, which is very tempting for young people; childhood marriages in India’s Rajasthan that cut short education,” stated the video clip. A young educator said the biggest reason behind thousands of girls dropping out of school before Grade V in many Rajasthan villages was “ logo ki soch, ki ladkiya padh-likhkar kya karengi. Aakhir mei toh unko choolah-chauka hi sambhalna hei, roti aur sabzi banani hei (People think, ‘why do girls need education; after all, they have to get married, take care of the kitchen and the family’).”

In poor countries, extreme poverty pushes parents to take decisions detrimental to their children’s future. In the Republic of Congo, over 7 million children were out of schools. Parents either couldn’t afford to pay the fees, or needed children’s help in the house or on the farms. In some countries, girls were pushed by parents into prostitution, while in others the boys were made to work in dangerous places such as mines. In almost all these countries, parents did not attach much worth to education or think it was important for the future.

Children in conflict zones

Natural disasters, particularly in Asian countries such as Bangladesh, put immense pressure on scarce resources and poor infrastructure. In many places, schools destroyed by the monsoon had to be rebuilt every year. In conflict and war zones, children were the worst affected, with the schools often bombed by both warring groups. Entire generations had their education stunted, if not destroyed, by violence.

Unicef Executive Director Anthony Lake said the greatest concern now is over Syria, where one million children have fled as refugees.

His experience during a recent visit to Lebanon was “devastating”; each one of those refugees was a child “ripped from home, facing horrors we can’t even imagine”. Over 3,000 schools had been destroyed, and 2 million children “pushed out of schools. We need to really ramp up our efforts to give them not only education and skills but also the hope that there will be reconciliation and they can return to Syria… But we are already seeing in the camps in Jordan, in Lebanon, a loss in optimism, a loss in hope of reconciliation, and if they lose that the next generation might follow.”

Commenting on the huge challenge of ensuring the survival and wellbeing of an entire generation of “innocents”, UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres said that even after crossing over the border to safety, Syrian children continued to be traumatised and depressed. Along with their education, their other essential needs such as sanitary facilities, vaccination, and so on had to be taken care of. What was most crucial was that having “a child in school also gives protection against sexual harassment and early marriage of girls, or dramatic situations where parents try to get their girls into prostitution for income. So having a child in school in emergencies protects them from so many problems.”

Cultural sensitivity

Describing her experience with some indigenous groups in the Amazon region of Brazil and other countries, Sheikha Moza said that such outreach efforts should respect the need to keep traditions alive while readying the children for the modern world. “We have to be sensitive to their cultural identities, and while giving them resources for education, we have to give confidence that their culture and heritage will not be attacked or compromised. It is not wise to impose our set of ideas on others; only by building their confidence can we change their situation.”

The essence of what she spelt out is evident in the work of the BMCE BANK Foundation for Education and Environment in Morocco. To remedy the underperformance of children belonging to the indigenous Amazigh tribe, Medersat.com brought their native language (a Berber dialect) into the classroom. This project bagged one of the six WISE2013 awards. While almost 45 per cent of Moroccans, particularly in rural areas, speak a local dialect, only Arabic and French are used in formal education, discriminating against Berber children who do not speak these languages at home.

Translating all the efforts put into education, some interesting nuggets emerged from WISE2013:

An additional year of schooling increases a child’s potential future earnings by up to 10 per cent. So investing in education is an investment in economic development.

In Uganda it gets even better — an educated girl is three times less likely to get HIV, and will earn 20 per cent more for every additional year in school!

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