Building Global Momentum for Free Education for All Children by Human Rights Watch, PLAN, Girls Not Brides   Mar. 2024   This year, at the United Nations’ top human rights body in Geneva, there are signs of a potential leap forward, with growing hopes for new legal recognition of every child’s right to free education, from pre-primary through secondary education.   On March 20, the Dominican Republic, along with other states including Luxembourg, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Panama, Nauru, and Romania, together with Human Rights Watch, Plan International, and Girls Not Brides will convene countries at the Human Rights Council to discuss the immediate need for a new legal instrument. They will emphasize the critical intersection between free preprimary and secondary education and human rights, with a particular focus on empowering girls and women.   Globally, nearly half of all children are not enrolled in preprimary education, with only 2 in 5 children in low- and lower-middle-income countries attending such programs.   Additionally, only 45 percent of children completed secondary school in 2021. For too many children, the cost of preprimary and secondary education remains a significant barrier to attendance.   Global failure to universalize free access to the full cycle of education perpetuates poverty and inequality and hinders societal progress and development.   For many, the cost is what prevents parents from enrolling their children in pre-primary and secondary education. Human Rights Watch has interviewed children and parents across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who said their inability to pay tuition or other school fees kept children from school.   International human rights law enshrines the right to free primary education—the stronger focus on primary education being a legacy of the era when various treaties were drafted, between the 1960s and 80s. But decades of research—and everyday experiences—demonstrate that primary education alone is insufficient to prepare children to thrive.   Updating international law to reflect today’s realities, by way of a treaty that would explicitly guarantee all children free education from pre-primary through secondary school, would accelerate global progress and focus world attention on removing one the biggest barriers to education.   Brain development is at its fastest in children’s early years, so it’s a critical opportunity to make a difference. Quality pre-primary education has long-term benefits for children’s cognitive and social development, and health. Preschool aids children’s successful transition to primary school and later educational attainment.   It ensures children with disabilities are included and supported in classrooms from the early years, promotes their enrollment, and reduces discriminatory attitudes against them. Pre-primary education reduces inequalities among children from different income backgrounds.   Secondary education, including technical and vocational training, empowers youth with a wider breadth of subject knowledge and skills that are essential to their futures, including a future with viable employment options and preparation for adult life.   Children with quality secondary education are more likely to find work as adults, earn more, and escape or avoid poverty. They are more likely to adopt healthier diets, seek medical care, have better mental health, and are less likely to have unintended pregnancies.   Secondary education boosts political participation, reduces marginalization, and enables children to use modern technologies. Ensuring children are enrolled and stay in secondary school helps prevent child labor, child marriage, and recruitment by armed groups.   Failing to guarantee free pre-primary and secondary education disproportionately harms girls and women. Many parents with limited resources face social pressure to prioritize their boys over their girls, so secondary education fees in particular keep girls from school.   Excluding children from preschool hinders parents—overwhelmingly mothers—from engaging in paid employment or otherwise participating in public life.   Expanding free public pre-primary and secondary education comes with significant costs to governments, but education investments provide enormous societal dividends and contribute to economic growth, thus paying for themselves many times over.   A number of low- and middle-income countries are making significant strides to provide more free education. Countries like Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Nepal, and Sierra Leone, among at least 110 worldwide, have legislation that guarantees at least one year of free preprimary education and free secondary education.   Even so, some countries will need international assistance. The UN estimates that the funding gap for free education from pre-primary through secondary could be filled if 40 higher-income countries met existing commitments to dedicate at least 0.7 percent of gross national income to oversees assistance, and allocated 10 percent of that support to education.   International human rights law has not kept pace. For example, the UN’s children’s rights treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, does not obligate states to provide free secondary education on the same immediate basis as primary education, nor does it explicitly reference early childhood education.   This discrepancy is spurring growing global support for enshrining these rights into a new legal instrument, a fourth optional protocol to the convention. In turn, new international law could propel further implementation of free education in countries where fees are still charged.   It is imperative that other states rally behind this initiative. Together, they can guarantee that every child can learn and fulfill their potential, laying the groundwork for a more just and equitable future.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/18/global-momentum-builds-toward-free-education-all-children http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/24/way-forward-international-education-day http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/28/more-70-countries-pledge-strengthen-right-free-education http://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/06/call-expand-international-right-education Visit the related web page
	The Impact of Humanitarian Crises on Children in 2023 by Alliance for Child Protection-Humanitarian Actiion   As we reflect on 2023 and embark on a new year, the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action is deeply concerned about the devastating consequences of increasing armed conflict, climate-induced emergencies, and disasters associated with natural hazards on children around the world.   The sharp escalation in the scale and intensity of armed conflicts and the increasing violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) throughout 2023 has had devastating consequences for children’s rights, including their right to protection. One in five children globally live in or are fleeing from conflict zones.   Forced displacement reached unprecedented levels in 2023 and children constitute 41% of all forcibly displaced people despite being only 30% of the world's population. Due to the protracted nature of conflict, the majority of these children will spend their entire childhoods in displacement.   Children are being maimed and killed, recruited and used by armed forces and groups, abducted, and subjected to sexual violence.   Meanwhile essential services and infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, are being attacked or used by armed groups and armed forces for military purposes, and life-saving humanitarian assistance is being deliberately denied.   The physical, emotional, and mental health impacts these violations have on children are devastating in the short term and will have detrimental impacts on their healthy development in the long term if not addressed.   The UN Secretary General’s 2023 report on Children and Armed Conflict included the highest ever numbers of verified grave violations against children throughout 2022.   Situations with the highest numbers of children affected were the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Israel and the State of Palestine, Somalia, Ukraine, and Syria.   Attacks against schools and hospitals increased by 112% and the recruitment and use of children by armed forces and armed groups rose by 21% compared to the previous year.   With the outbreak or escalation of conflicts during 2023—particularly in Sudan and the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—the number of violations against children throughout 2023 will almost certainly be higher.   Ending and preventing grave violations against children and ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable has never been more urgent.   Children have the right to a safe and healthy environment, yet the climate crisis continues unabated. During 2023, climate-induced disasters continued to increase in scale, frequency, and intensity, often against a backdrop of conflict and instability.   From catastrophic flooding in Libya, to climate, conflict, and poverty induced migration and displacement along extremely dangerous routes such as the United States-Mexico border, children pay the heaviest price, yet are the least responsible for climate change.   Devastating earthquakes in Syria, Afghanistan, Turkiye, and Morocco have exacted an enormous toll on children and their families. Social protection mechanisms, many of which are already reeling from the global pandemic and other crises, are only getting further away from meeting the increasing needs of the most vulnerable children and their families.   Economic vulnerability stemming from lack of livelihoods opportunities continues to be a major driver of child protection risks, such as trafficking, child labour, neglect, psychosocial distress, physical and emotional maltreatment, child marriage, family separation, and recruitment and use by armed forces and armed groups.   Funding shortfalls in 2023 saw significant cuts in food assistance to vulnerable populations around the world, exacerbating root causes of protection risks for many children.   In just one example, after the value of food vouchers to refugees in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh was cut by a third in the first half of 2023, there has been a reported increase in child neglect, child labour, gender-based violence, violence within the household, recruitment of boys into criminal groups, trafficking, and tension between refugee and host communities.   As more and more people are forced to flee situations of conflict, violence, and climate-induced disasters, the number of forcibly displaced people reached another record high in 2023 and is now over 114 million people. Children affected by forced displacement and statelessness face heightened risks of violence, neglect, abuse, and exploitation.   In Sudan, where the world’s largest child displacement crisis has unfolded since the outbreak of conflict in April 2023, unaccompanied and separated children are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by parties to the conflict.   Available data from some of the world’s most dangerous migration routes suggest that an increasing number of children in 2023 were unaccompanied or separated from families or caregivers.   More than 11,600 children crossed the Central Mediterranean Sea to Italy without their parents or legal guardians between January and mid-September 2023, an increase of 60% compared to the same period the previous year.   The Darien Gap—a remote, dangerous jungle crossing point between Colombia and Panama—saw a seven-fold increase in the numbers of children crossing in 2023 compared to 2022, amongst them a growing number of unaccompanied or separated children.   Without the care of families or other caregivers, children are at heightened risk of exploitation, abuse, and neglect, as well as recruitment into armed forces and armed groups, unsafe migration, child labour, gender-based violence, and experiencing prolonged gaps in access to education with increased likelihood of never returning to learning.   The unprecedented increase in children's rights violations and abuses throughout 2023, and in particular their right to protection, is alarming. Children (everyone under the age of 18) are a distinct group of rights-holders, with an additional set of rights accorded to them by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols, yet their rights are being flagrantly and increasingly violated with impunity.   For children today, this has a devastating impact on their right to survive and develop to their full potential. Dangerous cycles of violence are gaining momentum across many humanitarian contexts and are seriously jeopardising future peace while also impacting the ability of the children of tomorrow to survive and thrive.   Against a backdrop of increasingly complex, layered, and protracted humanitarian crises, growing needs, and widening funding gaps, it is more critical than ever to ensure all actors, work hand in hand to address children’s holistic protection and well-being needs. This requires children becoming a central element of all policies and decision making.   The protective factors that exist in a child's ecosystem are eroded during times of crises, and children face new and increased protection risks. Life-saving and life-sustaining protection services and supports, to meet increasing numbers of affected children and their families, need to be available and scalable.   While the best prevention remains the end to violence and hostilities and respect for the rights of civilians, particularly children, prevention of child protection harm is possible even amidst conflict and crises.   Humanitarian and development actors, including governments, can reduce the likelihood of Child Protection harms and child rights violations by addressing the root causes of harm. If we wait to act until a child suffers an abuse or violation, it is already too late, and the harm can have irreversible impacts. Preventing harm to children before it occurs is an ethical responsibility of all actors in humanitarian contexts, including governments.   It is upon all of us to stop the cycle of violence and adversity that is harming children at such scale. As we look ahead to 2024 and beyond it is imperative that children’s rights are protected as a priority, before, during, and post conflict and crises.   http://alliancecpha.org/en/TheUnprotected2023 http://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/ http://blogs.prio.org/2023/12/more-and-more-children-at-risk-of-conflict/ http://data.stopwaronchildren.org/ http://www.unicef.org/children-under-attack http://www.ipsnews.net/2024/02/imperative-protect-children-war/ http://watchlist.org/resources/advocacy-resources/ http://www.savethechildren.net/news/worlds-10-largest-crises-force-over-10-million-children-their-homes-one-year-save-children http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/number-displaced-children-reaches-new-high-433-million Visit the related web page
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