UN / EDUCATION CRISIS SITUATIONS

STORY: UN / EDUCATION CRISIS SITUATIONS
TRT: 2:42
SOURCE: UNIFEED
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGAUGE: ENGLISH / NATS

DATELINE: 19 SEPTEMBER 2022, NEW YORK CITY
SHOTLIST:

1. Wide shot, exterior, United Nations
2. Wide shot, conference room
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Yasmine Sherif, Director, Education Cannot Wait:
“We are faced with three factors that have increased the number of children and youth in armed conflict, over the past four or five years only, from 75 million to 222 million.”
2. Wide shot, conference room
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Yasmine Sherif, Director, Education Cannot Wait:
“Why? We have reached a historical, and a sad historical, amount of forcibly displaced people, the worst since the Second World War. We have armed conflicts that seem never-ending and new ones arising, and we see a dramatic increase in climate-induced disasters and financing has not kept up with these needs.”
5. Wide shot, conference room
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees:
“I can see that the substantive gains that we have made in the past, I would say six to seven years in terms of enrollment and quality of education, are going backward in spite of all the support that we try to give to education, and we need to be to be very careful about that, you know, because progress is there. I remember when I took over this job almost seven years ago, we had an enrollment rate of refugee children 50 percent This is very low compared to global benchmarks. We're now at 68 percent.”
7. Wide shot, conference room
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees:
“To achieve that inclusion in education, which in many situations means essentially ensuring that refugees, displaced, and other marginalized people are included in national education systems. That means that States that are hosting those people or theaters of displacement must have inclusive policies and laws. And that is sometimes very difficult.”
9. Med shot, conference room
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees:
“Inclusive Education, strengthening national system to include people that may come from another country are not easy politically. They meet a lot of resistance. And you have an issue of resources. That is quite dramatic because we don't have enough money, but you also have political resistance, and the two are often intertwined, and we need to work on both.”
11. Wide shot, conference room

STORYLINE:

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait said that the number of children and youth in armed conflict, has increased from 75 million to 222 million “over the past four or five years only.”

Talking during the Education Summit’s event ‘Education in Crisis Situations: A Partnership for Transformative Actions’, Sherif said that “We have reached a historical, and a sad historical, amount of forcibly displaced people, the worst since the Second World War. We have armed conflicts that seem never-ending and new ones arising, and we see a dramatic increase in climate-induced disasters, and financing has not kept up with these needs.”

Earlier, Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said, “the substantive gains that we have made in the past, I would say six to seven years in terms of enrollment and quality of education, are going backward in spite of all the support that we try to give to education”

He added that there is some progress, “I remember when I took over this job almost seven years ago, we had an enrollment rate of refugee children 50 percent, this is very low compared to global benchmarks. We're now at 68 percent.”

Grandi noted that in many situations, achieving inclusion in education “means essentially ensuring that refugees, displaced, and other marginalized people are included in national education systems. That means that States that are hosting those people or theaters of displacement must have inclusive policies and laws. And that is sometimes very difficult.”

Humanitarian appeals for the education sector received only 22% of the funds requested in 2021, far less than other sectors. In 2021, only 2.9% of global humanitarian financing was allocated to education, considerably below the UN target of 4%. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, education only received 3% of total stimulus packages in response to the health crisis and only 0.7% of funds requested under the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan.

Grandi colcuded, “Inclusive Education, strengthening national system to include people that may come from another country are not easy politically. They meet a lot of resistance. And you have an issue of resources. That is quite dramatic because we don't have enough money, but you also have political resistance, and the two are often intertwined, and we need to work on both.”

The world is witnessing an alarming increase in the number of people affected by armed conflict, forced displacement (including large-scale refugee displacement), environmental/climate-induced disasters, and other crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Spotlight Session 1, Member States and partner co-convenors (ECW, GPE, UNESCO, UNHCR, and UNICEF) seized the momentum of the United Nations Secretary-General-convened Transforming Education Summit to galvanize collective commitments and launch a renewed partnership for concrete transformative actions in crisis situations.

The Transforming Education Summit is being convened in response to a global crisis in education – one of equity and inclusion, quality, and relevance.

Often slow and unseen, this crisis is having a devastating impact on the futures of children and youth worldwide.

The Summit provides a unique opportunity to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda and to mobilize action, ambition, solidarity, and solutions to recover pandemic-related learning losses and sow the seeds to transform education in a rapidly changing world.