War and upheaval across parts of the Middle East and North Africa in recent years have driven more than 13 million children from school — 40 percent of the affected area’s school-age population, the UN said on Wednesday.
A report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) cast a sobering new light on the subtle long-term destructive consequences of violent conflicts that have convulsed a region encompassing all or portions of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and the Palestinian territories, particularly Gaza.
In some countries — particularly Syria, which once had one of the world’s highest literacy rates — many children who ordinarily would be third or fourth graders by now have rarely if ever been inside a classroom.
“Attacks on schools and education infrastructure — sometimes deliberate — are one key reason many children do not attend classes,” UNICEF said in a summary of the report.
In Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya alone, nearly 9,000 schools are out of use because they have been “damaged, destroyed, are being used to shelter displaced families or have been taken over by parties to the conflict,” it said.
Other reasons include “the fear that drives thousands of teachers to abandon their posts, or keeps parents from sending their children to school because of what might happen to them along the way — or at school itself,” the report said.
UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa Peter Salama said the report was based on calculations from the combined data for each individual population that have been compiled by the agency over the years.
“We’ve had country-specific numbers in the past, but not the aggregate of major trends in the region,” Salama said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan. “For us, it’s actually quite staggering when you aggregate the numbers across these countries.”
Five or 10 years ago, it was unusual to have even 10 percent of the school-age populations in the region out of school, he said.
“Now it’s 40 percent,” he said.
“Their educational achievements are going to be quite low,” he said. “These are the future professionals in these societies.”
While death, mayhem, hunger and disease are among the most obvious risks to civilians in these conflict zones, the collapse in primary education is another compelling reason for families with young children to flee.
This partly explains the increasing surge of migrants into Europe, Salama said.
“Seventy to 80 percent of asylum seekers have been from Syria,” he said. “It’s not coincidental.”
In Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where millions of Syrians have fled since the war in their homeland began in 2011, more than 700,000 refugee children are unable to attend school because the education systems in those countries cannot cope with the extra load, the report said.
Salama said the report highlighted what he called another alarming issue: If children are not in school, they are often working and exploited in hazardous jobs.
A parallel trend, he said, is increased recruitment of children into military and paramilitary organizations.
“In the past there was child recruitment, but it tended to be older boys in noncombat roles,” Salama said. “That has really changed in the last year or two.”
“We are on the verge of a lost generation of kids,” he said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese