In recent years, there has been a determined and almost diabolical process to undermine the right to education. The past decade was marked by a growing awareness of the importance of education, in particular following the World Education Forum’s adoption in 2000 of theDakar Framework for Action—Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitmentsand the emphasis on education in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, the same period has also witnessed continuing attacks on students, educators, and indeed entire educational infrastructures. Almost daily, we hear reports of deliberate attacks on universities and professors in Iraq, on schools and...

Some sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights¹ (UDHR), the commitment to realizing the human right to education has been a signal failure. It has seen the goals of Education for All² and the educational targets of the Millennium Development Goals³ continually subsumed to the logic of economics, which in turn sees education as nothing more than an instrument of the market. We are all affected to a certain extent by this failure. For some, however, the consequence is a complete denial of that right.

For much of my mandate as UN Special Rapporteur on Education,⁴ I have...

Although the subject of this book is substantially wider, I will limit myself to personal, field-based perspectives on the often fraught relationship between education¹ and child protection in armed conflict. I hope that this personal perspective, garnered from years working in the protection field, will remove us from the world of guidelines and policies and return us to the flesh-and-bone realities around the globe, where students, their teachers, and their communities often find themselves in the midst of armed conflict.

At the start of my career in child protection, with UNHCR in Central Africa, I was only “theoretically” aware of...

Around the world, there are approximately 75 million children out of school. More than half of them—40 million—live in conflict-affected fragile states.¹ In addition, an estimated 750,000 more children and youth have their education disrupted or miss out entirely on education each year owing to humanitarian disasters. Children experiencing emergencies are among the most vulnerable on the planet. These young global citizens often suffer not just from a lack of access to quality education but also from limited access to safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, and good nutrition. Some children may be exposed to HIV/AIDS and to other...

I am proud to announce that the war in Burundi is over! We are emerging from decades of conflict that has been cyclical through recent history, recently in a twelve-year civil war. The last rebel group has now put down its weapons and has turned into a political party, and its leaders and militants are integrated in government structures. Our government is seeking to develop the dividend of peace, with education as a cornerstone. As President, I am committed to this approach, as demonstrated in the concrete investments toward realizing free basic education for all children. But given our limited...

This book contains contributions by many distinguished authors who bring their expansive knowledge, research, and experience to bear on the issue of education in emergencies. My aim is to offer another viewpoint, that of children and young people like myself who have experienced conflict and who lost and (in some lucky cases) regained their education in this particular kind of emergency. I will refer to my experience, that of my friends and colleagues, my fellow members of the Network of Young People Affected by Conflict (NYPAW), and my research into young people’s experiences during the time of war. My desire...

In 1956, I was a resident of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, learning how to become a pediatric psychiatrist. At that time an epidemic of polio broke out—this was before the Salk vaccine had arrived—and a number of youngsters were hospitalized on our wards. Some of those boys and girls were in great trouble—unable to walk or use their arms, or, alas, more desperately, were spending their time in what were then called “iron lungs.”

One day a pediatrician teacher at the hospital suggested that I go talk with some of those young patients, and soon...

Providing educational services for children is a vital intervention during emergencies, chronic crises, and early phases of reconstruction. The spectrum of activities within the sector of Education in Emergencies are wide ranging and include nonformal education, basic literacy and numeracy, cultural activities and creative expressive outlets, sports and recreation, health education, life skills, peace education, teacher training, support to Community Education Committees, youth leadership, civic development, school rehabilitation, vocational training, and capacity building for host governments.

The primary mandate of relief organizations is often limited to assistance programs that are categorized as lifesaving in scope. These initial activities typically involve...

Teachers need tools to transmit knowledge to their pupils and to furnish them with competencies. As a rule, in emergency and post-conflict situations the pedagogical equipment is poor and the material conditions appalling, with school buildings destroyed and classrooms looted. A classroom may often have to accommodate forty or more youngsters of quite different learning abilities. Pupils need material they can rely on and make use of for homework and repetition. Textbooks and additional printed materials are still the most important and often used tools, representing contents and methodology of what should be learned—in spite of the increasing role...

In November 2008, two motorcyclists rode up to a group of schoolgirls and teachers chatting on their way to Mirwais Nika Girls High School in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, and threw liquid over them. Atifa Biba, fourteen, screamed as she felt and smelled her skin burning. The liquid was battery acid. When one of Atifa’s friends tried to wipe the liquid from her face, the assailants threw it over her, too, and then over others. The attack left at least one girl blinded and two permanently disfigured. The attackers were reportedly paid 100,000 Pakistani rupees ($1,190) for each of the fifteen...

Education is critical for all children, but it is especially urgent for the tens of millions of children affected by emergencies, whether caused by man-made or natural disasters. Armed conflict and natural disasters can significantly damage educational efforts and deny learners the transformative effects of quality education. Education is one of the principal losses in emergency situations: lack of education, too often stretching into the post-conflict phase, endangers well-being and survival.

At the same time, in emergency situations, quality education can play a crucial role in helping children and adults cope with their situation by learning knowledge and skills for...

War in the twenty-first century preponderantly takes place within states, not between them. Indeed, in the last decade of the twentieth century, intrastate wars outnumbered interstate ones.¹ When intrastate wars occur, huge displacement inexorably follows, mostly in what is characterized as fragile, fractured, or failed states in the Global South. Some displacement leads to self-settlement in new towns and villages, but for millions, such displacement usually results in the creation of Internally Displaced Person (IDP) or refugee camps. Most of the inhabitants of these camps are children, according to one recent estimate:

Right now, instead of playing games and going...

“Psychosocial” work tends to be labeled “soft” when compared to other approaches in humanitarian aid. Different programs on sanitation, shelter, and nutrition address material and physical needs that have a direct and clearly measurable impact on the lives of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees. It also tends to be commonly accepted that education programs are important in emergency contexts, although their overall impact is longer term oriented. Psychosocial work has been defended recently, despite the absence of hard evidence, because its issues focus on crucial considerations like “local empowerment and the restoration of dignity,” as well as the consideration...

Since 2003 eastern Chad has been the stage of one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time. The outbreak of the Darfur conflict led to a massive and ongoing movement of people toward safer areas. Six years later, more than 250,000 Sudanese refugees still live in twelve refugee camps along the border. The rapid response of the humanitarian agencies provided refugees with a decent level of services considering the harsh living conditions in the Sahel region and the insecurity that has prevailed since the proxy war between Sudan and Chad started. The World Food Program (WFP) has continued to...

In times of war, still photography retains a singular ability to transfix and disturb. From the carefully crafted and sometimes dissembled compositions by the legendary annalists of the American Civil War to the “trophy shots” of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, war photography can chronicle the horrors of conflict and the vulnerability of its victims with an often-transcendental power and emotion.

Among the most arresting images from the military operation that Israel waged in Gaza from December 27, 2008, to January 17, 2009, are a series that illustrates both sides of the artistry of the photojournalist....

After six years working for Save the Children in Afghanistan, I am seldom without an opinion—thoroughly informed or intuited and intensely felt—about the future for Afghan children.¹ This is particularly true with regard to basic health care, education, and protection, to which all Afghan children are entitled no matter how one chooses to characterize the state of affairs in the country: relief, recovery, development, or crisis. Personally, I would categorize Afghanistan’s current situation as a man-made emergency that is chronic and socioeconomic as well as political and ideological. Things are made worse, from time to time, by acute...

Cyclone Nargis had a severe impact on children in Myanmar when it struck in 2008. It changed the lives of children who lost their parents, siblings, and friends, children who found themselves in unfamiliar locations and children who took on additional responsibilities to rebuild their lives.

In the aftermath of an emergency, education, especially when it becomes the primary basis of child protection, is every bit as important as food, water, shelter, and health care. Child protection is an essential part of disaster response because without it children become vulnerable to disease, abuse, accidental separation from their families, and even...

In 2005, when natural disaster hit New Orleans, Louisiana, in the form of Hurricane Katrina, life came to a standstill. No aspect of city life was left untouched by the hurricane. It destroyed not only neighborhoods but also the city’s infrastructure. In addition, it completely uprooted the public education system of Orleans Parish. The public schools in Orleans Parish before the hurricane were far from delivering an adequate education to their students. Thus, this chapter is a story about constructing an entirely new and better system of public education to meet the needs of families in New Orleans, and, in...

The word “education” normally connotes schools, formal institutions of learning, for children and youth. This educational system poses special challenges in emergency situations. Education in the broader sense of information gathering and generation of knowledge about a given situation or issue, however, has other dimensions or parameters that are not any less challenging in emergency situations. These include: understanding the dilemmas that emergency situations present for those involved in humanitarian operations, both foreign aid workers and recipient national populations; developing knowledge and appreciation for the cultural context and the values of the people who are being assisted; learning about the...