“It’s an ‘Initiative’ not a ‘Study’”, emphasized Dina Craissati from UNICEF as she addressed the participants of a technical workshop of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children. Representatives from 7 countries (Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Romania, South Sudan, North Sudan, Tajikistan and Turkey) gathered in Istanbul, Turkey to share progress on the preparation of the Out-of-School Children Country Studies, and to learn from experiences and queries of other participants.
As Dina mentioned, we need urgent and concrete initiatives to provide education to the estimated 56 million children –nearly half of them in Sub-Saharan Africa—who are at risk of being left out of school by 2015. Exclusion from education has implications that go beyond schooling. It will seriously hamper these children to become productive citizens involved in society. This sense of urgency was palpable among representatives. An official from the Ministry of Education from Sudan declared: “We don’t have enough classrooms to fit all of our children! We should focus more on rural areas, and transport children to schools until we have financing to build more schools. Sometimes we have 200 children in one classroom. Children have to walk long distances to get to school, and many do not come.”
Istanbul is the 7th stop in the series of regional workshops for 25 countries taking part in this initiative discussing, sharing and receiving technical support from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and UNICEF on identifying and monitoring out-of-school children.
My role at the workshop was to present a methodology to identify and provide services to children with disabilities, which is being implemented in Cambodia as part of a two-phase approach looking at the profiles of out of school children including assessing children for disabilities. Among several hard-to-reach groups, children with disabilities, street children and working children are frequently mentioned by countries.
Yesterday each of the 7 participating countries shared their progress and challenges as they are working on calculating the number of out of school children and children who are in school, but at risk of dropping out. The discussion focused on the generic profiles of excluded children.
Below are the questions that countries are trying to answer to reach the goal of education for all children by 2015:
- Who are the children out of school?
- Where are they?
- Why are they not in school?
- What can be done to bring them to school?
“Can you please share how you deal with enrollment vs. attendance data when you prepare an analysis of out of school children?”, I overheard the representative from the Kyrgyz Ministry of Education ask a team from the Romanian Ministry of Education during the coffee break.
This and other questions will generate useful discussions meetings between country teams and experts. A global portal has been created for countries to use as a sharing mechanism and a resource tool as they are working on preparing their Out of School country studies. Hopefully we have come one step closer to answering the question: what will it take to bring ALL children to school by 2015?