t is shameful that, in 2006, there as still 115 million children around the world who are denied the right to primary education. It is even more disturbing that one-third of these children are being kept out of school because of the effects of conflict”, says the report ‘Rewrite the future, education for children in conflict-affected areas’ presented by the non profit organization ‘Save the children’.
At least 43 million children from around the world can’t attend primary school because they live in countries wracked by war. The drop out rate is as high as 89.2% in Somalia, without a government since 1991 after the fall of Siad Barre; 65.2% in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at war for years; 41.7% in Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world. In Ethiopia up to six million children don’t attend primary school; the same happens to nearly eight million should be students in Pakistan.
“Most of them spend their childhood in refugee camps or temporary dwellings, but they can’t wait for the war to end before we can start to work on their education”, say Jan Eliasson and Haya Rashid al-Khalifa in the report’s introduction. Having been presidents of the 60th and 61st session of the UN General Assembly, both Eliasson and Rashid al-Khalifa remind the world’s leading countries of their promise to guarantee universal primary education by 2015.
This result is one of the ten Millennium Development Goals. The absence of social help, destroyed schools, teachers sent to war and killed, unexploded bombs: these are just some of the reasons for quitting schools in countries like Eritrea, Burundi, Angola, Colombia, Sri Lanka. Even in countries where peace has been restored the school drop out rate is high: 58.6% in East Timor, 30.1% in Liberia.
(From MISNA)