Education Cannot Wait

The official launch of the UN Secretary-General's Education First Campaign took place a few days ago. It's really positive to see that quality education in conflict and/or disaster-affected communities is high on the agenda. In the coming days I'll try to post on some of the key points of the Education First vision document. In the meantime below is the related Education Cannot Wait infographic. For more on the Education Cannot Wait - Call to Action, check this out. 

p.s. Thanks to all of the recent new followers on Twitter (despite my lack of recent blogging)! I love to interact with you all, so for those of you who aren't following yet, you can find me at: @GEDBlog 

Neglect of education in slow-onset emergencies

'In Somalia in 2011, school enrolment rates plummeted due to the food crisis and large-scale displacement. The Education Cluster estimates that more than 1.8 million children aged 5–17 are out of school in South and Central Somalia alone – the worst-affected region, due to persistent and ongoing conflict and drought. The current education coverage and response supports only 20% of the school-age population in this zone. The availability of education for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and local host communities has not been sufficient to meet the need.  

Challenges to effectively delivering education in Somalia include:
• the lack of an appropriate curriculum
• inadequate learning spaces
• a lack of trained teachers from affected communities
• insufficient teacher remuneration and incentives for teaching
• the underlying challenge of the absence of a governance structure.  

Scarce teaching and learning materials are not enough to cover even the current low enrolment rates, made worse by the continued lack of funding for education in emergencies. 

In the Dollo Ado camp in Ethiopia and the Dadaab camp in Kenya, resident populations increased significantly during the 2011 crises – from already high levels. More than a quarter of a million Somali refugees arrived at the two camps in 2011 alone. The camps now host more than 600,000 Somali refugees, approximately 60% of whom are children. 

Providing education in the camps is particularly challenging given the chronic lack of services for the host populations in marginalised, drought-affected areas, where many refugees have settled. Many refugee children have had little or no previous access to formal education in Somalia, making it even more difficult to integrate them into the limited formal schooling in host communities. In Dollo Ado, only an estimated 15–20% of children are currently accessing education services.'

As well as East Africa, the report also discusses West Africa. Read the full report here.

DFID's aid to education in Pakistan - perpetuating the problem?

I question this on the back of Imran Khan's fierce drive to get into power or at least gain more seats in Pakistani government with his party Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice). He speaks time and time again about the need to stop aid to Pakistan if the country is to develop. I must say I agree - Pakistan has definitely seen better days. If the current aid is not working towards capacity building, then it's likely causing more damage for the long-term. In the short-term, stipends from DFID are helping those young people who otherwise would have had to stop their education for one reason or another. The question then is: is the aid all that bad? Or is it simply making issues worse for the long-term in Pakistan? Can aid ever be non-political?

Decide for yourself: Watch the story of a woman who has received one of the stipends. 

French Aid to Education Staying in France, says EFA Blog

According to the EFA World Education Blog: 

'Foreign aid is supposed to go to foreign countries. But there are many grey areas in terms of what can be counted as aid, and who can be classified as a recipient. Figures on total aid to education, for example, suggest France is a top performer: it was the largest bilateral donor to education in 2009 (the latest year for which data are available) with $1.9 billion disbursed. But only a quarter of this sum goes to developing countries. The rest essentially stays in France, or directly benefits French citizens.

 [...]

For several years in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report we have highlighted the fact that the majority of aid to post-secondary education from France, Germany and smaller donors such as Austria or Portugal goes to “imputed student costs,” or the cost of educating developing-country students in institutions in donor countries. As the figure below shows, in 2009 half of all French aid to education was channelled to French higher education institutions that way.'

Worth reading the short post in full to get the full story. 

Dadaab - 20 years on

Not all of the people living in the Dadaab camps arrived there as refugees. The compound is also home to some 10,000 third-generation refugees whose parents were also born in the camps.

Twenty years on from when it was first set up, the Dadaab refugee complex in northern Kenya houses close to half a million people. It was designed to host 90,000.

Twenty years on, and three generations later, the international community still defines a refugee situation as 'temporary'. Whilst we're dealing with semantics, I'll also mention that all funding is labelled aid; development - and therefore what is termed development assistance - is viewed as incompatible with such a sprawling complex. I talked of the progress required in refugee education in a previous post, and in the case of Dadaab, security issues remain the biggest challenge to providing sufficient assistance.

Twenty years on, repatriation remains the 'durable solution' advocated by UNHCR.

(Quote source: http://www.devex.com/en/news/dadaab-turns-20/77563)