Tag Archives: Education

Without school, children of Mosul feared lost to poverty and conflict

Falah, 11, sells vegetables and fruits in a market in eastern Mosul, Iraq April 20, 2017. REUTERS/ Muhammad Hamed

By Ahmed Aboulenein

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Ahmed Abdelsattar was 14 when Islamic State swept into Mosul and declared a caliphate in 2014. Fearing he would be indoctrinated and sent to fight by the militants, his parents took him out of school.

Three years later, he sells ice cream at a refugee camp for internally displaced Iraqis. His family have lost their home and his father is too old for the manual labor positions at the camp, which means he is his family’s sole breadwinner.

Coupled with a shortage of teachers, books and supplies, the 17-year-old sees no reason to go to the makeshift schools set up in the Khazar camp near Erbil.

“Going to school is now useless. I am helping my family,” he said. He adds that it is too late for him anyway. Had his education not been interrupted, Abdelsattar would be graduating in a few weeks.

Abdelsattar is one of tens of thousands of children orphaned or left homeless by the war on Islamic State and forced to work to support their families in Mosul, the militant’s last major city stronghold in Iraq.

Returning these children to school is a priority for Iraq to end the cycle of sectarian violence fueled in part by poverty and ignorance, the United Nations says.

“Investment in education is urgently needed, without which Iraq could lose an entire generation,” said Laila Ali, a spokeswoman for the UN’s children agency UNICEF.

“Children from different ethnicities and religions, in the same classroom, will promote a cohesive society and will get children to think differently.”

Even in the half of Mosul east of the Tigris River that has been retaken by Iraqi forces, where 320 of the 400 schools have reopened, Reuters interviewed dozens of children working as rubbish collectors, vegetable vendors or mechanics.

“I did not go to school because Islamic State came and they would teach children about fighting and send them to fight,” says 12-year-old Falah by his vegetable cart in Mosul.

Within earshot, fighting was still raging. Just across the river, government troops, artillery and aircraft were attacking Islamic State’s last stronghold in western Mosul.

Falah has four younger brothers. None of them have ever been to school.

ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS TWO

Huzayfa studied up to the fifth grade but stopped when Islamic State came. The militants taught math using bullets, rifles and bombs, said the 12-year-old, who sells scrap metal.

“They taught us ‘one bullet plus one bullet’ and how to fire weapons,” he said.

The local education department in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, estimates 10 percent of children in east Mosul are still out of school. There has been no official count for almost four years, it said.

There are also no official statistics on the dropout rate, a spokesman for Iraq’s Education Ministry said, especially as many families have fled Mosul or Iraq altogether.

“We are counting on parent-teacher conferences and local officials to convince parents to send their kids back to school,” said Ibrahim al-Sabti.

Government funds normally allocated to education have been depleted by corruption and mismanagement, lawmakers and non-governmental organizations say, citing the results of investigations in 2014 and 2016.

Oil-rich Iraq historically had very high literacy rates and primary school enrolment was 100 percent in the 1980s.

Illiteracy became rampant after international sanctions were imposed due to the August 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait. Economic hardship was made worse by the civil war that broke out after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

LOST FUTURE

Schools in east Mosul started reopening in January and so far around 350,000 students are back in class, compared to 183,229 in 2013, with much of the increase due to displaced people from west Mosul and surrounding villages.

UNICEF estimates around 1.2 million Iraqi children are not in school nationwide.

The Iraqi military expects to dislodge Islamic State from the rest of Mosul in May but the militants are mounting a strong resistance in the densely populated Old City.

Iraqi troops began their offensive in October backed by a U.S.-led international coalition providing air and ground support. The militants are fighting back using booby traps, suicide motorcycle attacks, sniper and mortar fire and sometimes shells filled with toxic gas.

For children like Ahmed Abdelsattar, whether or not the group is finally ousted from Mosul has little bearing on their fate.

If he is lucky, he will return to where his home used to be in western Mosul’s Al-Jadida district, an area where local officials and eyewitnesses have said as many as 240 people may have died in March when a building collapsed after a blast, burying families inside.

“The future is lost,” he said with an air of resignation.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Trump seeks to shrink federal role in education with new order

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order on education as he participates in a federalism event with Governors at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S. April 26, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to review the U.S. government’s role in school policy, which supporters cheered as the first step in creating more local control in education and critics worried could lead to lower quality schools in poorer neighborhoods.

DeVos has 300 days “to review and, if necessary, modify and repeal regulations and guidance issued by the Department of Education with a clear mandate to identify places where D.C. has overstepped its legal authority,” said Rob Goad, a Department of Education official, according to a transcript of a White House call with reporters.

The second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, California’s Kevin McCarthy, said the federal government had in recent years exceeded its legal authority in creating regulations and guidance

“Different people in different states and communities will have different goals and ways of achieving those goals. That is something we should celebrate and enable, not try to stop,” he said in a statement.

The Democratic National Committee, though, said the order was politically motivated, with Trump wanting something to show in school policy in his first 100 days.

The head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said the current education law, Every Student Succeeds Act, already reduces federal power over schools, especially when it comes to standards and teacher assessments.

“What the new law doesn’t do is abandon the requirement for the federal government to protect the civil rights of our students, even if those rights run counter to what states and districts want to do,” she said in a statement.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Fed’s Kashkari calls for changes to U.S. education system

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari speaks during an interview at Reuters in New York February 17, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari said on Thursday that the U.S. education system needs an overhaul and called for more parental choice, failing schools to be shut down and additional research to tackle issues.

“We must not stand still – not just for the sake of our economic competitiveness, but also so that we become a fairer society where all Americans have a real opportunity to fulfill their potential,” he said in prepared remarks to a Federal Reserve childhood education research conference in Washington.

Kashkari, the lone dissenter against the U.S. central bank’s decision last week to raise its benchmark interest rate, did not mention monetary policy or the economic outlook in his speech.

Instead, he focused on strategies to improve educational outcomes that would have the knock-on effect of strengthening U.S. employment.

Those would include greater choice for parents picking where to send their child to school, according to the former Republican candidate for California governor.

“I believe all parents — across income, racial and geographical groups — should be able to choose where to send their children to school,” Kashkari said.

The U.S. central bank does not have policy levers to target education but does have a host of researchers looking at all aspects of the economy.

(Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Kansas Supreme Court finds state underfunds schools

(Reuters) – The Kansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the state’s system of funding primary and secondary public schools falls short of an adequacy requirement in the state constitution.

The high court said it was delaying enforcement of its unanimous ruling until the end of June to give the legislature time to respond.

It warned that if the state fails to come up with a funding system that complies with the constitution by the June 30 deadline, the court will move to void the current method of school finance.

Kansas spends more than $4 billion a year on schools, with most of the money coming from the state general fund. The supreme court’s ruling could add another $800 million, according to Alan Rupe, an attorney for the four school districts that filed the lawsuit.

The ruling comes at a bad time for the Kansas budget. Tax cuts enacted in 2012 have gouged a hole in the budget as revenue failed to meet monthly estimates, although February marked a fourth straight month that collections met or exceeded projections.

A move in the state legislature to boost revenue by raising tax rates and eliminating a business exemption failed last week when the Senate was unable to override Governor Sam Brownback’s veto.

Rupe said the state’s fiscal woes should not interfere with the requirement to fund education properly.

“I don’t know that the constitution provides constitutional rights only when we can afford to do it,” he said.

The governor’s office will make a comment once the ruling is fully reviewed, according to a Brownback spokeswoman.

S&P Global Ratings cited the state’s structural budget pressures and reliance on one-time revenue measures when it revised the outlook on the state’s AA-minus credit rating to negative from stable last month.

(Reporting by Karen Pierog and Tracy Rucinski in Chicago; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)

Iraq faces challenge of educating Mosul’s displaced children

Iraqi children stand behind the doors of their home during a fight with Islamic State militants in Rashidiya, North of Mosul, Iraq, January 30,2017.

By Ayat Basma

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Yousef, 14, pushes a wheelbarrow through a sprawling camp in Iraq running errands for pennies, the only source of income for his family of 11.

On a good day, he makes 2,000 dinars ($1.70) but if business is slow he scrambles to find leftover bread and food to sell to sheep owners in the crowded Khazer camp, near Mosul, home to Iraqis displaced by the fight against Islamic State.

“Eleven people and I am the only one supporting them. My father is old,” Yousef told Reuters, adding that he does some trips for as little as 250 dinars.

Like millions of children in the country, Yousef’s hopes of an education ended when Islamic State swept through northern Iraq in 2014.

Many parents opted against enrolling their sons in Islamic State-run schools for fear they would be recruited to join the militant group, leaving the children to find jobs to help support their family.

A report by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF last year said that almost 3.5 million Iraqi children of school age were missing out on an education, with more than half a million estimated to be at work rather than in class.

The need for income was heightened after the World Food Programme said on Friday it had halved the food rations distributed to 1.4 million displaced Iraqis because of delays in payments of funds from donor states.

Ahmed Ali, a former factory worker in Mosul, said his children had to go to work as he could not find a job.

“It is a very painful situation. Of course I feel sorry for them. What did he do to deserve this? My son is eight years old now and he doesn’t know how to write down his own name,” Ali said.

With the recapture of eastern Mosul last month, there is hope that children will begin returning to school.

Twelve-year-old Mortada is one of those keen to ditch his work selling empty plastic bottles and catch up on three years of lost education.

“Of course, school is better than work. In the future, I want to be a doctor or a pilot,” he said.

($1 = 1,181.0000 Iraqi dinars)

(Writing by Patrick Johnston in London; Editing by Alison Williams)

U.N. to need $8 billion this year to help Syrians at home and abroad

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations said on Tuesday it will need a total of $8 billion this year to provide life-saving assistance to millions of Syrians inside their shattered homeland and to refugees and their host communities in neighboring countries.

The first part, a $4.63 billion appeal for 5 million Syrian refugees – 70 percent of whom are women and children – was launched at a Helsinki conference. Funds will be used to provide food, rent, education and health care.

A separate appeal for an estimated $3.4 billion to fund its humanitarian operation to help 13.5 million people inside Syria after nearly six years of war, is being finalised.

“The crisis in Syria remains one of most complex, volatile and violent in the world,” U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien told a news conference.

Attempts to end the conflict in Syria have so far failed. After two-day talks, Iran, Russia and Turkey earlier announced a trilateral mechanism to observe and ensure full compliance with a ceasefire.

“Of course we fear that it will get worse,” O’Brien said. “And even if peace was to take place from tonight, the humanitarian needs within Syria would continue for a good time to come.”

Five countries – Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt – host nearly 5 million Syrian refugees, a “staggering number”, with few in camps, U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi said.

“Even if Syrians have stopped arriving in Europe in any significant numbers, I hope that everybody realizes that the Syria refugee crisis has not gone away and continues to affect millions in host communities and continues to be a tragic situation,” he said.

It was too early to say whether any solution would lead to further displacement or people returning to their homes.

“There is uncertainty surrounding the political process, we all hope that it will move in the right direction, but we can’t tell. We’ve had disappointments in the past,” Grandi said.

Providing livelihoods and restoring basic utilities are a priority in Syria, said Helen Clark, administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

“Even were there to be a political settlement tomorrow, we would still be here seeking support for humanitarian relief for a country that has been brought to its knees, with 85 percent living in poverty, 50 percent in unemployment and with the severe economic and social impacts on the neighborhood.”

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Miles and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Syrian child refugees struggle to get an education: U.N.

A refugee child receives school supplies and is taught by volunteers

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian refugee children in Lebanon are struggling to get an education and many are being pushed into work or early marriage instead, the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said on Monday.

Around 187,000 youngsters – roughly half the school-age Syrian children in the country – are not going to classes, the agency said, as it launched a documentary on their situation.

“Poverty, social exclusion, insecurity and language barriers are preventing Syrian children from getting an education, leaving an entire generation disadvantaged, impoverished and at risk of being pushed into early marriage and child labor,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Tanya Chapuisat.

After nearly six years of war, more than half Syria’s people have fled their homes, including more than a million to Lebanon.

One boy in the documentary, 14-year-old Jomaa, told UNICEF he had forgotten how to read or write since dropping school and taking up $2-a-day job.

Mohamad, aged 11, said he had not been to school since arriving in Lebanon four years ago, and his parents had sent him to work.

Abeer, aged 13, said she left Syria six years ago and no longer went to classes because there was no safe transport to take her.

To view the documentary, click here: http://imagineaschool.com/

(Reporting By Angus McDowall; Editing by Tom Perry and Andrew Heavens)

Hurricane Matthew closes schools for thousands of Haiti’s children

partially destroyed school in Haiti

By Makini Brice

LES CAYES, Haiti (Reuters) – As Haiti cleans up the destruction wrought by Hurricane Matthew, which killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes, the storm has also disrupted the education of many school children in the country.

School has resumed for students in many parts of Haiti that escaped the worst of Matthew’s wrath, but an estimated 100,000 children are missing class after their schools were either reduced to rubble or converted to makeshift shelters.

In battered Les Cayes in southwest Haiti, many whose homes were blown away by Matthew remain holed up in Dumarsais Estime National School, meaning children were unable to resume class.

Bernadette Saint-Louis, a 38-year-old hawker of bananas and beans, said she came to the shelter with her four children as the storm approached.

Like her, many who lost everything to the hurricane had little if any money to send their children to school – and little option when nearby schools had been knocked down.

“Only God knows what I will do for them,” she said. “I have nothing to live on.”

While the capital, Port-au-Prince, sustained little lasting damage from the hurricane, the damage to schools along Haiti’s southern coast has raised questions about how to resume the school year in the area.

At least 300 schools in the region were destroyed or were being used as shelters, meaning over 100,000 children were missing class, UNICEF said.

Education in Haiti is a political hot-button issue ahead of a looming presidential election, which has been delayed again by the storm. Virtually every major presidential candidate has promised to expand access to schooling.

At the start of the school year in September, amid persistently high unemployment, inflation and stagnant economic growth, the cost of school fees, books and uniforms was a major topic in local media for weeks.

Interim President Jocelerme Privert cited the damage to schools in an interview on Tuesday. “We must find a way to make them functional,” he said.

That is also the hope of Haitian school director Jean-Emmanuel Pierre-Louis. Shortly after the storm passed over the area, he stood in the remains of his office in the Centre of Classical Training College of Port Salut.

The damage was severe. The private school, which had been built on the side of the mountain where teachers and students had views of green, rolling hills, no longer had a roof and chunks of its walls were now rubble scattered across the floor.

Pierre-Louis pointed to a periodic table of elements, all that was left of the chemistry lab. Files of some of the 350 students had been laid out to dry on surfaces under the sun.

Salvaged benches sat stacked outside. The remains of some classrooms were too precarious to venture into.

Pierre-Louis’ home was destroyed by the hurricane, as were those of family members and students.

“What will we do with the students if the state and the international community does not intervene?” he asked.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Peter Cooney)

Iraq’s war children face void without world’s help: UNICEF country chief

UNICEF Iraq Representative Peter Hawkins speaks with media at a school for displaced people who fled from Mosul, in Nahrawan district, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq December 16, 2015. Picture taken December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A generation of children face the bleak prospect of going without an education unless the Iraqi government, its allies and aid agencies rebuild communities torn apart by years of war, a senior U.N. children’s agency official said on Friday.

Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Iraq, said recent fighting between government forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, and Islamic State fighters, had cut off thousands of children from school and healthcare.

“We are faced with a whole generation losing its way and losing prospects for a healthy future,” said Hawkins in an interview.

Government institutions, faced with financial deficit, are collapsing leaving them dependent on U.N. agencies to provide schools and teacher training, following more than a decade of sectarian violence, Hawkins said during a visit to London.

“What is needed is a cash injection through central government so that we can see it building the systems required for an economic turnover,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Conflict has worsened the situation across Iraq, with an estimated 4.7 million children – about a third of all children in the country – in need of assistance, the U.N. agency said in a report last month.

Mass movements of people forced from their homes by fighting in areas like Ramadi and Falluja, west of the capital, Baghdad, put one in five Iraqi children at risk of death, injury, sexual violence, abduction and recruitment into fighting, the report said.

UNICEF said earlier this year that at least 20,000 children in Falluja faced the risk of forced recruitment into fighting and separation from their families.

“A big problem is the lack of schools, with a lack of investment in recent years meaning the systems have all but collapsed,” Hawkins said.

CHILD RECRUITMENT

Thousands of civilians across much of western Iraq’s rugged Anbar province have been driven from their homes into the searing desert heat in the last two years, as a tide of Islamic State fighters took control of key towns and cities.

Despite losing considerable ground on the battlefield, a massive suicide bombing in Baghdad’s central shopping district of Karrada last weekend showed Islamic State remains capable of causing major loss of life.

In Anbar, where fighting has ruined scores of residential areas, many of the people displaced by the militants were now “in limbo”, waiting in displacement centers, Hawkins said.

Nearly one in five schools in Iraq is out of use due to conflict. Since 2014 the U.N. has verified 135 attacks on educational facilities and personnel, with nearly 800 facilities taken over as shelters for the displaced, UNICEF data shows.

But Hawkins said he expected thousands of families to soon return home and rebuild their lives.

In Ramadi, where government forces retook control last December, UNICEF will help the ministry of education reestablish schools, provide catch-up lessons and teacher training over the summer after it had been “flattened” by fighting, Hawkins said.

The veteran aid worker, who has also worked in Angola, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said his “biggest fear” was that children could get caught up in a battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city still held by the militants.

Protection of children must be part of a military strategy to retake Mosul, said Hawkins.

Pressures on UNICEF’s $170 million annual budget for 2016-17, which Hawkins said was short by $100 million, were hampering its ability to reach all those affected and may mean some child protection programmes are abandoned, he said.

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Ros; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Violent Conflicts Force 1 Million African Children Out of School

Violent conflicts in Africa, fueled by the Boko Haram insurgency, have forced more than 1 million children out of school, the United Nations Children’s Fund reported Tuesday.

The organization, commonly known as UNICEF, reported that the children have been forced out of class in northeastern Nigeria and the neighboring nations of Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

UNICEF said that total doesn’t include the 11 million kids in those four countries who were already out of school before Boko Haram began its insurgency six years ago. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Islamic extremist group killed more people last year (6,644) than any other terrorist organization — including the Islamic State, to which it has pledged allegiance.

But Boko Haram is only partly responsible for the violence in Nigeria.

Fulani militants, who use often violent tactics to control grazing land for their livestock, killed 1,229 people last year, according to the Global Terrorism Index. Because Nigeria houses two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist groups, the country had 7,512 terrorism-related deaths last year. That was more than any other country but Iraq, which established a record with 9,929.

According to UNICEF, more than 2,000 schools are closed in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The organization says hundreds of them have been set ablaze, looted or otherwise attacked, and that some of the closures have stretched on for more than a year. In Cameroon, for example, UNICEF reported that 135 schools closed in 2014 and only one of them has reopened.

Part of the reason for the lengthy closures is that there’s a fear of future terrorist attacks. UNICEF reported that 600 Nigerian teachers have died during the Boko Haram insurgency.

Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s regional director in West and Central Africa, said in a statement that many children are now at risk of dropping out of school entirely as a result of the violence.

“The challenge we face is to keep children safe without interrupting their schooling,” Fontaine said in a statement. “Schools have been targets of attack, so children are scared to go back to the classroom; yet the longer they stay out of school, the greater the risks of being abused, abducted and recruited by armed groups.”

UNICEF said it’s taken some steps to help educate children in the region, like establishing some temporary learning spaces and expanding some schools, but they’ve reached less than 200,000 kids. Security issues and funding shortages have complicated the group’s outreach efforts.

UNICEF said it will need about $23 million to educate children in the four countries next year.