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Classroom in Ukraine after bombing
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IMAGO/Vincenzo Circosta / IMAGO/ZUMA Wire
Wars, poverty and a lack of investment in schools make it difficult for millions of children and young people around the world to access education.
Several aid organizations warned of this on Tuesday, International Education Day.
In some regions of the world, the situation has been precarious for a long time.
Educational opportunities in Ukraine have deteriorated dramatically since Russia's war of aggression.
According to the aid organization Save the Children, a school has been destroyed on average every other day since the start of the war.
"The war has made it incredibly difficult for children in Ukraine to access education," said Sonia Khush, Country Director of Save the Children in Ukraine.
According to the organization, since the beginning of the war about a year ago, 3,025 educational institutions such as schools, kindergartens and universities have been bombed and shot at.
406 of them were completely destroyed.
"Save the Children" refers to figures from the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science.
Millions of Ukrainian children are forced to study at home
The children's charity Unicef warned that the past eleven months of the conflict had exacerbated the major problems in the education sector caused by the corona pandemic.
Children in eastern Ukraine have also been suffering from the conflict with Russia for eight years.
Fighting in residential areas has now resulted in thousands of schools and other educational institutions across the country being damaged or destroyed.
At the same time, many parents did not let their children go to school for safety reasons.
1.9 million schoolchildren in Ukraine would only follow the lessons virtually, 1.3 million would use the digital offers in part.
But this type of education is also in danger because of the Russian attacks on the infrastructure: power outages mean a "constant challenge" for the schools.
"Millions of children have had to study at home due to the constant threat of shells and rocket attacks, and now even online learning is further hampered by frequent power and internet outages," Khush said.
In other parts of the world, millions of children also have poor educational opportunities, be it because of wars, poverty or because the governments of their countries invest too little money in schools.
People living in sub-Saharan Africa have the lowest reading skills in the world
The United Nations warns that the education crisis in eastern and southern Africa is worsening.
A joint statement by the children's charity Unicef and the educational organization Unesco states that 41 million of the approximately 165 million school-age children there did not receive an adequate school education.
The region includes crisis countries such as South Sudan and Somalia, but also South Africa and Namibia.
In addition to the lack of teachers, the United Nations primarily criticizes the tight budgets of governments for education.
Somalia, for example, only spends 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education.
The states in the region also missed out on sustainable development of the education sector as a result of the first World Education Forum in Dakar 23 years ago.
At that time, the world community agreed on the goal of giving all children worldwide access to basic education by 2015.
In East and South Africa, only a provisional educational infrastructure was set up and poorly trained teachers were hired with uncertain contract conditions.
These interim solutions are still largely standard today.
The United Nations has therefore called on the countries in the region to allocate a fifth of their national budgets to spending on education in the future.
According to the UN, sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest reading skills in the world: only one in ten 10-year-olds can read and understand a simple text.
International Education Day is celebrated annually on January 24th.
Since December 2018, the UN has wanted to honor the role of education in global peace with this day of remembrance.
fok/dpa/Reuters