Girl children are forced into becoming sex slaves, while boys are taught to rape. Every child is trained to kill.
In conflict areas, where these occurrences are the norm, the children’s education is often the last thing on the agenda.
A panel discussion titled “Educating In The Extreme: Education Above All” at the 2013 World Innovation Summit for Education (Wise) conference in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday revealed it’s not entirely known how many children of school-going age are out of school.
As the discussion’s moderator — UK broadcast journalist Mishal Husain — explained, these are children in hard-to-reach places who aren’t captured in the statistics. The most recent Unesco figures estimate that there are about 57 million of these children worldwide. What is known, however, is that half were driven out of education because of conflict.
“Schools are destroyed by warring factions. In Syria alone, more than two million children are out of school. (In other areas) entire generations have had their education stunted by violence,” Husain said.
The UN high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, said only two-thirds of children in a refugee situation go to primary school, IOL news informs.
