Over a quarter of a billion school-aged children are still out of school today.
It took 5 days of deep introspection to eventually write this for no other reason than the fact that the development space is a lot. Every year, on the 24th of January, the development community celebrates the International Day of Education. I have participated actively since 2021 as a writer (I even wrote an article 4 years ago, as well) , SDG volunteer, advocate or event sponsor. Feels so draining to be back to the same old story. Every year, same story, same recycled statistics, same numbers, little or no change. Sigh!
Last Friday, we saw a lot of flyers, event posters and webinars to commemorate the day. But here’s another side of the story, Statistics on Education across thematic areas like AI integration, Gender Inclusion and Peace were published by the Global Statistics Institute of UNESCO and it was not encouraging.
You can say “International Day of Education” and give it a theme like “AI and Education: Human Agency in an Automated World” to make it sound bougie. But after all is said and done, what are we really celebrating? When the statistics [According to the Global Monitoring Report by UNESCO] shows that…
1 in 3 Children living in conflict-affected areas were out of school throughout 2024.
There is a worldwide deficit of 44 million teachers to meet the target for Sustainable Development Goal 4 of “Quality Education for all by 2030.”
70% of students and 30% of teachers are not ready to tackle climate change.
Since 2015, Out-of-School Children population has reduced by only 1%,
As at 2022, only 15 countries had included AI in their curricula.
With 2030 just 5 years away, this is something to brood upon. Although a lot of progress has been made as a result of funding and advocacy, there are more grounds to cover in the areas of Education globally. When we call on leaders to #answerthecall, we are calling on them to:
Fund education
Invest in educational systems in Conflict-affected areas
Provide infrastructures to integrate climate education a nd AI into our schools curricula.
This is important because:
No Sustainable Development Goal [SDG] can be achieved without proper and intentionally curated educational implementation plan; not a single one!
Children cannot leverage AI when they cannot even read and write in the first place. This puts them at risk of being left out of the opportunities of the future.
Climate Education is undermining education simultaneously. Climate change effects like global warming and wild-fires are displacing students who are the leaders of tommorrow.
When the future leaders are not protected and educated, war and conflict is inevitable.
Education should be the priority SDG for the decade. When Governments and organizations ignore the call, they are ignoring the future of over 250 million children. The time to #answerthecall is now.