Weekly Global Education News | October 22, 2017
Update on issues affecting teachers, children, and schools around the world
Violence in Myanmar driving up to 12,000 Rohingya refugee children into Bangladesh every week — UNICEF
“Many Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh have witnessed atrocities in Myanmar no child should ever see, and all have suffered tremendous loss,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. “These children urgently need food, safe water, sanitation, and vaccinations to protect them from diseases that thrive in emergencies. But they also need help in overcoming all they have endured. They need education. They need counselling. They need hope. If we don’t provide them with these things now, how will they ever grow up to be productive citizens of their societies? This crisis is stealing their childhoods. We must not let it steal their futures at the same time.”
#MeToo Sparks a Global Conversation on Violence Against Girls & Women
As feminist activist Gloria Steinem put it, “The greatest indicator of the world’s stability, wealth and safety is the status of women.” All girls and women deserve to be treated with respect, to choose and shape their own future free of intimidation and violence. Violence against women needs to be discussed openly, not hidden.
5 examples of how education can help reduce extreme poverty
According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring Report, 420 million people could be lifted out of poverty with a secondary education, thus reducing the number of poor worldwide by more than half.
UNICEF and partner agencies in South Sudan help reunite 5,000 children with families
Since conflict broke out in South Sudan in 2013, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Save the Children and other partners have successfully reunited more than 5,000 children with their families.
“Keeping families together is the best way to ensure that children are protected, which is why the family tracing and reunification process for unaccompanied children is so important,” said UNICEF Country Representative Mahimbo Mdoe in a press statement Wednesday.
India tries coding camps, craft centers and all-girls schools to fight illiteracy
Now change, while slow, is coming to this country that has long left females behind, particularly here in Rajasthan, where only 52.66 percent are literate and some 350,000 are not in school, according to Educate Girls, a nonprofit aimed at getting more rural girls into classrooms. Less than half of them finish 10th grade in this pocket of northwestern India.
Here and elsewhere in this rapidly growing country, girls are increasingly the focus of new initiatives aimed at keeping them in school. All face obstacles.
Mobile medical teams provide a lifeline for children in Yemen
With more than half of Yemen’s health facilities no longer functional, mobile medical teams are often the only way to reach children with lifesaving help. As of July, UNICEF and partners, like Relief International, have provided treatment to nearly 82,000 children for severe acute malnutrition this year. But as the number of people in need of assistance continues to grow, UNICEF is appealing for increased funding to reach and help the most vulnerable children in Yemen.
High-Level Meeting on Ending Child Marriage
Every seven seconds, a girl under the age of 15 is married. Moreover, six of the top 10 countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage in the world are in West and Central Africa. While there has been social and political progress to end this harmful practice, we still need additional and more concerted efforts to accelerate progress and end child marriage in our lifetime.
