Education Cannot Wait Executive Director Yasmine Sherif
Statement on the Day of the African Child
NEW YORK, June 16, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- As we speak,
millions of crisis-affected girls and boys across the African
continent are being denied their human right to a quality
education. In the absence of financial means to provide a quality
education, or still suffering the brunt of protracted conflicts,
Africa's children do not enjoy the
same rights as the rest of us. As an immediate consequence, girls
are forced into child marriage, boys are recruited into armed
groups, millions of children are hungry, and millions more are
illiterate. Few of them have any means to move beyond such an
existence without receiving an inclusive and continuous quality
education.
As we commemorate the Day of the African Child under this year's
theme of "Education for all children in Africa: The time is now", we need to follow
the lead of the African Union and the African people in receiving
their long-awaited right to a quality education across the
continent. Long delayed and overdue, the time to empower an
Africa fit for the 21st
century is now.
A panoply of interconnected challenges undermines local and
national initiatives to deliver on the collective goal of
'education for all' in Africa.
Extreme poverty and conflicts over resources expose children and
adolescents to armed conflict and violence on a daily basis. There
are 35 recognized armed conflicts across the continent that
continue to rage in countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South
Sudan and Sudan.
Forced displacement is on the rise as a result of conflict,
climate change, extreme poverty and instability. In all, 44 million
people are displaced in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNHCR
statistics from 2023, up from 38.3 million in 2021.
In Africa, the climate crisis
is also an education crisis. Over the past 10 years, an estimated
42 million crisis-affected children in Sub-Saharan Africa have
faced climate shocks amplified by climate change. In 2023, Cyclone
Freddy left a path of chaos and destruction. Approximately 1,500
classrooms were destroyed, disrupting learning for half a million
students and forcing 1.4 million people on the move across
six countries.
Extreme poverty and economic losses add to the collected risks
that are pushing children and the young generation out of school
and derailing efforts to deliver on the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). Four out of 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa live in
extreme poverty. With high class fees and limited resources in the
household, children are forced to join the workforce, get married,
gather water, or simply stay home from school because their
families can't afford a school fee.
These collective challenges have resulted in the single largest
education crisis in the world today. According to UNESCO, 98
million children are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Even when
they are in school, the quality of learning is often severely
lacking, and Africa has the
highest illiteracy rate in the world today.
This education crisis is having vast impacts on Africa's social and economic development, and
perpetuating further non-virtuous cycles of conflict, hunger and
displacement.
Sudan is on the brink of the
worst education crisis in the world today. Since conflict began in
April 2023, a staggering 18 million
children have been pushed from their schools. Even before the
conflict, there were 6.9 million out-of-school children. In
Nigeria, 20 million girls and boys
are out of school. In Ethiopia,
conflict, drought, poverty and other factors have resulted in 13
million children out of the classroom. This adds up to 51 million
children out-of-school in just these three countries alone. In the
Democratic Republic of Congo, a
resource-rich country, among many in Africa, economic interests force African
children into child labour rather than into attending school.
We Live in the 21st Century
What's wrong with the world? All of us need a new vision that is
based on human rights for all, and education is at the core of such
a vision. Not just education for the few or the privileged, but
education for all of Africa's
children. To deliver on this, we need to embrace human rights in
action, based on the promises outlined in the Convention on the
Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and
Welfare of the Child.
It starts with resources. In the face of such blatant inequity,
we, as a global community, need to shoulder our responsibility by
urgently and substantially increasing funding for education in
Africa. Education Cannot Wait
(ECW) is calling for US$600 million
in additional resources to reach our US$1.5
billion resource mobilization target. This will allow us to
reach 20 million crisis-impacted children worldwide, and to
scale-up our investments in Africa.
Addressing the injustice towards Africa, we also need to support African
leadership. As outlined by the African Union, member states across
Africa are expected to ensure
free, inclusive primary education, reduced costs for secondary
education, and substantial investment and support for early
childhood education. Financial resources are key to providing
action-oriented and results-driven support.
Given its power to lift-up entire generations and transform
minds, education is the single most powerful tool we have in
delivering on each and every one of the SDGs in Africa. Some of our greatest role models for
humanity were educated and thus able to help all of us to advance
cooperation and human rights worldwide.
National ownership and localization are imperative to our
efforts. By connecting global donors, UN agencies, civil society
and the private sector with national governments and local
non-profits, we can scale-up the impact, for Africa and the world, of each and every dollar
we invest in education in Africa.
The Day of the African Child commemorates a student uprising in
1976 in Soweto, South Africa. At
that time, students marched en-masse to protest the poor quality of
education and apartheid. Hundreds of students and innocent
bystanders were killed, many more were injured.
While apartheid came to an end under the leadership of
Nelson Mandela, nearly 50 years
later, after the attacks on students in Soweto, children across Africa are still being denied their inherent
right to a quality education and schools are being attacked. How
many more children must die or must be pushed into the shadows,
generation after generation? This is the 21st century
and the long-awaited time for education for every child in
Africa is NOW.
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/long-delayed-education-for-every-child-in-africa-302173520.html
SOURCE Education Cannot Wait