At the COP28 Climate Talks in Dubai, Education Cannot Wait Calls on Donors to Urgently Mobilize More Resources to Scale Up Life-Saving Access to Quality Education for Crisis-Impacted Children

By Gordon Brown and Yasmine Sherif
London/New York, Dec 5 2023 (IPS)

“The one international language the world understands” wrote Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, “is the cry of a child,” and the evidence is accumulating that children are not only the innocent victims of conflict whose pleas need to be heard, but also the most vulnerable victims of climate change.

The climate crisis is an education crisis. Right here, right now, climate change is robbing millions of children and adolescents of their right to learn, their right to play and their right to feel safe and secure.

In Pakistan deadly floods destroyed or damaged over 26,000 schools last year. This exposed over 600,000 adolescent girls to higher risks of school dropout, gender-based violence, and child marriage. In Ethiopia, girls like Mellion are going hungry and risk dropping out of school forever as a result of the ongoing drought.

While the climate crisis threatens the rights of every person on the planet, those who are enduring the brunt of its impact are the most vulnerable girls and boys already living in protracted crises settings due to armed conflicts, forced displacement and other crises. For them and their communities, climate change is already a daunting reality that can mean the difference between life and death, between war and peace, between the chance to learn or not.

Today, there are more than 224 million crisis-impacted children worldwide who urgently need education support. New analysis by Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, hosted by UNICEF, has found that 62 million of these children have been impacted by climate hazards such as droughts, floods, cyclones and other extreme weather events since 2020. That’s close to the total populations of several G7 nations such as the United Kingdom, France or Italy.

While these children have contributed least to the issue of climate change, they have the most to lose. Furthermore, over the last ten years, 31 million school-aged children have been displaced by the climate crisis, with 13 million in the last three years alone.

The climate crisis poses a real and present threat to global security, economic prosperity and the very fabric of our societies. Climate impacts could cost the world economy US$7.9 trillion by 2050, according to the World Bank, and could force up to 216 million people to move within their own countries by 2050.

Cyclones, typhoons, floods and droughts are increasing in severity and intensity. The number of disasters driven, in part, by climate change has increased five-fold in the past 50 years. Climate hazards are driving displacement directly, but also driving competition over scarce resources and threatening fragile peace in many parts of the world. Over 70% of refugees and internally displaced people on the move due to conflict and violence originally came from climate change hotspots.

Taken together, these intersecting crises of climate change, displacement and conflict are having a profound effect on education opportunities for millions of children and adolescents around the world.

As we look at this year’s Climate Talks in Dubai (COP28) and the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, we must connect the dots between climate action and education action. It’s our investment in our people, our planet and our future.

To rise to this challenge, ECW is calling on donors, the private sector and other key partners to urgently mobilize US$150 million in additional resources. This is an important contribution towards ECW’s overall resource mobilization target of US$1.5 billion toward the Fund’s 2023-2026 strategic plan.

We all know that education has a sound return on investment. Long-term investments in human capital – including education, skills training and overall health and well-being – offer 10 times more return on investment than investments in physical capital. By investing in education today, we are investing in economic and social prosperity tomorrow, we are investing in an end to displacement and hunger, we are investing in a better world and children’s futures.

The climate crisis threatens to end human civilization as we know it today. Now is our time to address this issue head on, and education plays a key role. By ensuring learning continuity for the most vulnerable children – and connecting quality education with climate action – we can equip an entire generation of climate stewards with the skills to adapt to the changing environment and pave the way to a better future.

In the eye of the storm, we are calling on new and existing donors to stand with us. We are appealing to you to act: right here, right now. Will you take up this challenge?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown is the UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Steering Group.

Yasmine Sherif is the Executive Director of Education Cannot Wait, the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises.

IPS UN Bureau

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Girls read from their textbooks at the Dasht-e-Barchi Education Centre in Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Shehzad Noorani

By Gordon Brown
LONDON, Sep 15 2023 (IPS)

With hope and courage, we must rise to the challenges before us. We must rise to the challenge of a world set afire by climate change, forced displacement, armed conflicts and human rights abuses. We must rise to the challenge of girls being denied their right to an education in Afghanistan. We must rise to the challenge of a global refugee crisis that is disrupting development gains the world over. We must rise to the challenge of brutal and unconscionable wars in places like Sudan and Ukraine that are putting millions of children at risk every day.

By ensuring every single child has access to quality education and embracing the vast potential of the human spirit – especially the 224 million girls and boys caught in emergencies and protracted crises that so urgently need our support – we can rise to this challenge. It’s a chance for girls with disabilities like Sammy in Colombia to find a nurturing place to learn and grow, it’s a chance for girls that have been forced into child marriage like Ajak in South Sudan to resume control of their lives, it’s a chance for refugees like Jannat in Bangladesh to find hope and dignity once more.

As Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies, has successfully completed its first strategic plan period and now enters its second strategic period, we are seeing time and again the power of education in propelling global efforts to deliver on the promises outlined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other crucial international frameworks. By ensuring quality holistic education for the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable children in crisis settings, we invest in human capital, transform economies, ensure human rights, and build a more peaceful and more sustainable future for all.

The achievements outlined in ECW’s 2022 Annual Results Report tell a story of a breakout global fund moving with strength, speed and agility, while achieving quality. Together with a growing range of strategic partners, ECW reached 4.2 million children in 2022 alone. It was also the first time girls represented more than half of the children reached by ECW’s investments, including 53% of girls at the secondary level, which is a significant milestone in achieving the aspirational target of 60% girls reached. Now in its sixth year of operation, ECW has reached a total of 8.8 million children and adolescents with the safety, power and opportunity of a quality, inclusive education. An additional 32.2 million children and adolescents were reached with targeted interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are also seeing a global advocacy movement reaching critical mass, together with stronger political commitment and increased financing for the sector. In 2022, funding for education in emergencies was higher than ever before. Total available funding has grown by more than 57% over just three years – from US$699 million in 2019 to more than US$1.1 billion in 2022.

However, the needs have also skyrocketed over this same period. Funding asks for education in emergencies within humanitarian appeals have nearly tripled from US$1.1 billion in 2019 to almost US$3 billion at the end of 2022. This means that while donors are stepping up, the funding gap has actually widened, and only 30% of education in emergencies requirements were funded in 2022.

With support from key donors – including Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, as the top-three contributors among 25 in total, such as visionary private sector partners like The LEGO Foundation – US$826 million was announced at the ECW High-Level Financing Conference in early 2023. Collective resource mobilization efforts from all partners and stakeholders at global, regional, and country levels also helped unlock an additional US$842 million of funding for education in-country, which was contributed in alignment with ECW’s Multi-Year Resilience Programmes in 22 countries, and thus illustrates strong coordination by strategic donor partners who work in affected emergencies and protracted crises-contexts.

We must rise to this challenge by finding new and innovative ways to finance education. To date, some of ECW’s largest and prospective bilateral and multilateral donors have not yet committed funding for the full 2023–2026 period, and there remains a gap in funding from the private sector, foundations and philanthropic donors. In the first half of 2023, ECW faces a funding gap of approximately $670 million to fully finance results under the Strategic Plan, 2023–2026, to reach more than 20 million children over the next three years.

The investments will address the diverse impacts of crisis on education through child-centred approaches that are tailored to the needs of specific groups affected by crisis, such as children with disabilities, girls, refugees, and vulnerable children in host communities. These investments entail academic learning, social and emotional learning, sports, arts, combined with mental health and psycho-social services, school feeding, water and sanitation, as well as a protection component.

Since ECW became operational, we have withstood the cataclysmic forces of a global pandemic, a rise in armed conflicts that have disrupted social and economic security the world over, the unconscionable denial of education for girls in Afghanistan, floods and droughts made ever-more devastating by climate change, and other crises that are derailing efforts to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Now is the time to come together as one people, one planet to address the challenges before us. Now is the time to embrace the vast potential of the human spirit. With education for all, we can make sure girls like Sammy, Ajak and Jannat are able to reach their full potential, we can build a better world for generations to come.

Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown is United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education

IPS UN Bureau

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Children in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earn 44 cents a day cutting used condensed milk cans. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Gordon Brown
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2013 (IPS)

“Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.”

Gandhi’s challenge from 1948 should be uppermost in our thoughts this week at the Washington summit led by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, when we examine why progress to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has stalled.

Gandhi’s challenge is this: who will speak up for the most marginalised – the out-of-school child, the child slave, the trafficked boy, the girl bride, the street child? Who will speak up for the most vulnerable and the hardest to reach? These are the forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help. And yet the most revealing conclusion of our decade-long anti-poverty crusade is that despite great, and in some cases, outstanding progress, we have done least for those most in need.

This week in Washington, in the presence of Ban Ki-moon and Jim Yong Kim, we are discovering that unless we target resources on the most vulnerable, they will continue to miss out. While the MDG process has made huge strides for universal education, it has been best at plucking the “low hanging fruit” – with some of the most marginalised left high and dry. So there are still 15 million children working full-time when they should be at school, and ten million school-aged girls who get married every year, unlikely to return to education.

For these reasons, but also because of shortages of teachers and classrooms – and often sheer discrimination against girls – a total of 500 million girls growing up today will never complete their schooling.

Unfortunately our failure is no accident: universal goals, which do not explicitly target resources on the most vulnerable, mean that those who are already the most marginalised will continue to go without. Indeed, as we formulate a new set of post-2015 anti-poverty targets, we have to recognise that future MDGs will also fall short on delivery if they do not ensure more resources go to those in need.

Adam Wagstaff of the World Bank concludes from his studies on health as well as on education that: “It’s not actually true that progress at the population level will automatically entail faster progress among the poor. If inequalities in education and health outcomes across the income distribution matter, and if we want to see ‘prosperity’ in its broadest sense shared, it looks like we really do need an explicit goal that captures inequality.”

Our failure to reach those most in need is not just ethically indefensible for anyone who believes in equal opportunities. It is self-evidently bad for the MDGs: we can’t accelerate progress unless we get serious about reaching the poor.

So a new focus on the marginalised is central to new plans put by Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others to the Washington summit this week. Nigeria is considering extending a World Bank pilot offering conditional cash transfers to girls in northern states who represent the largest group in the country’s ten million out-of-school population.

Ethiopia – which has seen one of the most rapid expansions of education enrolment anywhere in the world – is also now targeting the out-of-school girls in hard to reach rural areas who have so far not benefitted from the country’s progress. The DRC wishes to abolish school fees, which currently deter two million pupils from going to school.

Bangladesh wants to go further. It has also decided more resources are needed for the children of the flood zones and hill areas and the victims of child labour and child marriage – but it is also making an equity goal explicit in order to reach the most marginalised. It has committed to closing the gap in attendance rates between the richest and poorest income groups and to closing the learning gap between the best and poorest performing areas. Bangladesh faces a huge uphill fight to deliver on its new policy of increasing public spending on schools. It simply does not have the money for educational investment – either domestically or from the international community – to fund its new direction.

So while the public justification for all our efforts is to help the poorest, the frailest, the neediest and most vulnerable, we are coming to realise that our focus on universal goals must be matched by extra resources for the most marginalised. Indeed, when the next set of post-2015 MDGs includes more ambitious universal targets for learning outputs and secondary education, we must do more to prevent the most disadvantaged being left further behind. Put simply – as we start to raise the ceiling, we must not forget to finish putting in place the floor.

As Pauline Rose of the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report has concluded: “Unless we have a goal that tracks progress for the poorest and richest…on education access and learning, gaps are likely to remain when we reach the next deadline for goals.”

So one of the lessons to learn from more than ten years of experience in trying to meet the MDGs is that, without corrective remedies, unequal outcomes in one generation conspire with unequal access to resources in the next to make a mockery of genuine equality of opportunity. Here we rely on and are influenced by the original thinking of Indian economist Amartya Sen, who argues that “equivalent freedom” for people who come to the table with unequal advantages requires more resources to turn the right to equal treatment into real opportunity.

Fortunately there is already a growing consensus that without this focus on inequality we cannot meet our ambitions on behalf of the poor. In education we need what Kevin Watkins of the Overseas Development Institute calls “stepping stone” targets for reducing inequalities, with timelines for 2020 and 2025 on the way to our universal goals in 2030. Further commitments are required to reduce the gap in school attendance and completion rates between poorest and wealthiest and between best and worst performing areas.

What makes me convinced that we could gain support for these measures? It is that these forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help are prepared to be silent no more.

Poor rural girls now know that they do not have the freedom to choose to go to school – and that the 2015 goal of schooling for all will not be worth the paper it is written on without a commitment to greater equity. Child labourers know that they have been left behind – and that their human right to education is not being delivered by their governments or the international agencies responsible.

I am struck by the energy, creativity and determination I see in these new civil rights movements, led by Malala Yousafzai. Children are providing leadership lessons from which we can learn.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Child labourers rescued in Delhi waiting to be sent back to their villages. Credit: Bachpan Bachao Andolan.

By Gordon Brown
LONDON, Feb 22 2013 (IPS)

Next Monday, after more than two months of public anger against the rape of a young Indian student, the Indian Parliament will consider new legislation to toughen up judicial and police provisions addressing violence against women.

And as India demands that more is done to protect the rights of girls and young women, there is the chance of eliminating another form of brutal exploitation. Child trafficking and child slavery will for the first time be defined in legislation in India – with a view to outlawing them altogether.

These demands of Global March Against Child Labour and its Indian co-partner, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, have not only been incorporated in the high level judicial committee constituted to suggest amendments in the Indian criminal legislations, but also included in the Ordinance signed by the President of India.

If we are to succeed – and if India is to lead the way in abolishing these practices globally – the same popular pressure that has brought about the changes in anti-rape laws is now needed to persuade Indian parliamentarians to force an end to the enslavement of children in this way.

Soon, the Indian Parliament will have the chance, for the first time in its history to pass this law which defines and criminalises trafficking and slavery. In addition to this, the Indian Parliament would also have a chance to pass another pending legislation to ban child labour.

Today I invite everyone concerned about the abuse of the rights of boys and girls around the world to add their names to the petitions that we will put to the Indian Parliament urging its members to put an end to child slavery.

The plight of these children is highlighted by the personal tragedy of a 14-year-old girl, Ratni. Her predicament represents everything we are trying to change.

I have been told the true identity of Ratni – one of some 500 Indian girls who every day fall into the hands of slave traders. We are protecting her name because although she has now been freed and reunited with her parents, her sister remains in slavery, still subject to a life of abuse as a bonded labourer – without school, without security from assault and violation, without hope.

Ratni’s story symbolises the urgent need to push for an immediate end to all forms of child labour. I believe we can make a change in the law in India a significant step towards abolishing child slavery across the world.

Ratni was trafficked from a village in Jharkhand in the east to Delhi where she was forced to work as a domestic servant from dawn till dusk.

Her story unfolds in an all too familiar way. A family friend, Subhash, approached her parents, offering their daughter a better life with the promise of both paid work and an education. When she reached Delhi, neither awaited her. Ratni was handed over to Subhash’s younger brother, Ramesh, who placed her in bonded labour.

After a year she was moved on to the Punjab by her slave master where he repeatedly forced himself on her. Ratni tells us: “He had planned to sell me off to a man for Rs 350,000 but the buyer did not have sufficient cash.” While she was in transit at a railway station she was rescued by Bachpan Bachao Andolan, a movement founded by Kailash Satyarthi.

This story has a better ending than most – Ratni was not, in the end, sold into prostitution. Her experience outlines, though, a regular pattern: parents who live in poverty believing their child was being offered a better life by a family friend who turns out to be a trafficker. A young girl not only subject to cruel exploitation as a slave but vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence, too.

Due to pressure from Kailash and his team, the traffickers have been forced to pay compensation to Ratni. However 200,000 Indian girls like her are trafficked into child slavery every year, joining some 215 million children condemned to child labour worldwide.

The problem is wide-ranging as children are made to work not just as domestic slaves but often in dangerous industries – from agriculture and construction to tin, gold and coal mining and factory production. It’s believed that at least 115 million of these children are working in hazardous conditions. They spend their days in fields, mines, kitchens and on building sites, prevented from getting the education they need to prosper.

Research shows that even where they receive some part-time schooling, it is of poor quality, and attainment is significantly hindered. Worse still, each year 15 million children under the age of 14 don’t receive a single day of schooling because they’re forced to carry out full time work. Their childhood is completely lost, their innocence destroyed and their potential thwarted.

Progress is already being made. The Ordinance which strengthens the laws against child trafficking and forced labour was signed by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, earlier this month. This is a significant development in India’s penal system, making it easier to punish those caught enslaving children and deter abusive employers like Subhash and Ramesh. But now, it must be passed by the Indian Parliament.

More though has to be done – and this is where popular pressure can play its part. The bill before the Parliament would outlaw all child labour under 14, as well as many hazardous forms of work for those under 18. This vital legislation would help ensure children are moved from the old oppression they now suffer to the new opportunities they should have the right to enjoy.

Some 750,000 have already signed the petitions we are putting to the Indian Parliament this month. We are asking the Parliament to agree this new law be brought in immediately. Please join them.

Double their number and let us ensure that from around the world many more than one million voices are heard calling for an end to child labour and trafficking and the evil practices that ensure that, even in the twenty-first century, slavery thrives.

You can watch a film of Ratni’s story at www.educationenvoy.org and add your name to the petitions supporting the Indian legislation at Avaaz and Walk Free.

Excerpt:

Less than two weeks after being left for dead by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai is standing up on her own two feet.

Her remarkable progress, reported by doctors at the specialist unit of a brilliant hospital I know well – Selly Oak, Birmingham – reveals yet another dimension of the courage and resilience of the world’s most famous 14-year-old girl.

Today signatures of the Malala petition – led by the United Nations Education Envoy site, Avaaz, Women of the World and others, and reached on www.iammalala.org – are approaching one million. The petition calls for action to ensure every girl has a place at school in Pakistan and indeed around the world. It is directed to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

When I hand him the petition I will ask the President to lead governmental changes in policy to ensure the delivery of girls’ education in Pakistan. I will also submit our petition to the United Nations to galvanize international support for the right of every child to go to school.

I will present the petition to the President during a trip to Pakistan on November 10, a month after Malala’s shooting. This day has also been designated as a global day of action for Malala – and I call on you to make your voice heard in support of this amazing young woman and in support of the cause that she championed.

Malala’s story, portrayed in a film on www.educationenvoy.org, is being told around the world. Footage of her in tears explaining that she wants to be a doctor but is unable to go to school has understandably captured the imagination of girls everywhere.

Not just the British people, who are offering the best specialist medical care, but the whole world too is wishing Malala well. Determined to ensure that their message is heard at the highest levels of the Pakistani government, the campaign is being supported by friends of Malala wearing ‘I am Malala’ t-shirts across Asia and in the West.

Malala is being adopted as every child’s sister and every parent’s daughter. For one Malala shot and temporarily silenced, there are now thousands of even younger Malalas ready to come forward who will not be silenced.

We may not yet be seeing a 2012 Asian equivalent of an Arab youth revolt but the spontaneous wave of protests demonstrates that children are more assertive of their right to education than the leaders who promised to deliver it. Indeed the protests reveal a world no longer willing to tolerate the gap between the promise of opportunity for all and the reality of 61 million boys and girls shut out from even the most basic of primary schooling.

Just last week, a United Nations education audit that I launched with UNESCO director Irina Bokova exposed why for too long we have been too complacent in assuming inevitable year-by-year progress to universal education.

Gordon Brown, U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education, at a BRAC-run school in Hai-Kugi village in South Sudan earlier this year. Credit: Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown.

The report showed that despite a global commitment that every child would be in primary school by 2015, there are still 61 million children of primary-school age who are not in education, 32 million of them girls. The arithmetic of educational neglect makes grim reading. Fifteen million children who should be at primary school are working full time. Ten million girls every year leave education to become child brides, and millions more are trafficked.

In some areas of the world we are not just stalling, but sliding backwards. The UNESCO report will highlight how much we have neglected 28 million out-of-school refugee girls and boys, displaced children in the camps, tents, and shacks of broken-down regimes and conflict zones.

Yet today just 3 billion dollars of global aid goes to education, amounting to a meagre, shameful 12 dollars per child in Africa, hardly enough to finance a schoolbook and far less a teacher or a school. As need rises, aid is falling this year, and unless something is done, it will fall every year through 2015.

Yet because of a new initiative, Education First, launched last month by Ban Ki-moon, bringing together every U.N. and World Bank institution concerned with education, we can act quickly and ensure that Malala’s suffering will not be in vain.

Young people around the world should demand that each country where children are out of school prepare a national plan setting out exact teacher needs, and the building and financing requirements for achieving the 2015 target. At the core of each plan should be strategies for policing an end to child labour, child marriage, and discrimination against girls.

Malala may have been silenced temporarily, but her cause can never be silenced. This wonderful young woman is fighting for her life because she fought for the right of every girl to go to school. Now we must all fight for Malala’s cause.

* Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education and will visit Pakistan on November 10, when he will present the petition to President Zardari, and which he has declared a global day of action for Malala. You can add your voice at www.educationenvoy.org .]