DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN-EDUCATION: Rains and Floods Devastate School Systems

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 20 1998 (IPS) - A rash of natural disasters – including floods and hurricanes – has seriously damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of schools and other educational facilities in Asia, Africa and Central America.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that, in China alone, about 48,766 schools were damaged or destroyed by the worst floods in four decades in that country. Destruction, estimated at about 1.3 billion dollars, also has deprived more than nine million Chinese children of schooling.

The monsoon season in Bangladesh, which this year lasted three times longer than normal, severely damaged about 14,000 schools. Torrential rains in Somalia, from October 1997 to January 1998, damaged or destroyed at least 100 schools in the Juba Valley.

In central America, about 1,419 schools were hit by Hurricane Georges in the Dominican Republic in September. The devastation caused to schools by Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua is still being evaluated.

“1998 will go down in history as a year when acts of nature closed school doors to millions of children,” UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said Tuesday. “It is hoped that 1999 will be a year of unprecedented global partnership to restore life and learning to those same children.”

Bellamy also saysd that in response to a year of unusually severe natural disasters, she has asked several of her country offices to itemize the effect of these disasters on education.

“As upheavals in nature become more frequent and intense, there is an urgent need to develop special contingencies to protect education when catastrophes strike,” she says. “The greatest risk to a child’s prospects for completing an education is an extended period when there is simply no school – and interruption that reinforces pressures to drop out entirely.”

China and Bangladesh are two of the hardest hit countries. “There is a terrible synergy in this, Bangladesh already faces formidable challenges to education. For example, only 14 percent of girls are enrolled in secondary schools. The recent destruction of schools there only multiplies the effects of an already desperate situation,” Bellamy says.

Although no figures are available yet for some of the countries devastated by the hurricane in Central America, Bellamy, who visited Honduras and Nicaragua, says the rebuilding of the educational infrastructure should be high on the list of priorities throughout the region.

UNICEF is offering on-the-ground expertise and help, particularly in the area of psycho-social services to children traumatised and dislocated by natural disasters this year. The New York-based U.N. agency has appealed to international financial institutions and donors to help the massive rebuilding effort in these countries.

Bellamy hailed a recent announcement by the World Bank that it is providing a 200 million dollar credit to Bangladesh for fast- track emergency flood recovery.

Meanwhile, the annual “State of the World’s Children 1999”, released by UNICEF last week, focuses primarily on education. In that report, UNICEF notes that the recent devastation of school facilities was an unanticipated, added burden on a global system that already is severely limited in its capacity to meet the right of all children to basic education.

The study estimates that nearly one billion people – or one- sixth of humanity – are classified as functionally illiterate and are unable to read a book or sign their names, much less fill out a simple application form or operate a computer.

UNICEF says that 130 million children in the developing world are denied the right to education – almost two-thirds of them girls. The study partly blames the debt crises for bringing progress to an abrupt halt. Crippled by debt repayments and falling commodity prices, most Third World nations have slashed expenditures, including spending on education.

UNICEF says the world’s poorer nations carry a 2.2 trillion dollar external debt, making it extemely difficult for them to invest in education.

Debt remains a crisis, particularly for the most severely indebted countries – and for many of their people who struggle every day to feed their families, pay for critical medical treatment or send their children to school. Besides debt relief, UNICEF has called for increase development assistance to countries fighting for economic survival.

“The world will need to spend an additional 7.0 billion dollars per year for the next 10 years, on average, to educate all children. This is less than what is spent annually on cosmetics in the United States – or on ice cream in Europe,” UNICEF says.