Education Is a Child's Right
Every child has the right to an education. Education transforms lives and breaks the cycle of poverty that so many children are caught in. And an educated child will make sure her own children receive an education.
Innovative Programs to Reach All Children
UNICEF has come up with some unique ways to make education accessible to everyone. In Ethiopia, we build migrating schools that follow the pastoral rhythms of a nomadic community. In Afghanistan, where under Taliban rule women and girls were forbidden to attend school, we are setting up literacy centers so that everyone can get the education they deserve.
In the aftermath of war, often nothing can make a child feel more secure than having a school to go to. After the Rwandan genocide, 800,000 people were dead and 95,000 children were orphaned. Many children had witnessed horrible violence or were forced to commit atrocities. For these children, going back to school meant a return to normalcy. So UNICEF developed its School-in-a-Box kit, a portable classroom with all the supplies needed to hold a class anywhere. Since then our School-in-a-Box kits have been distributed during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, after Hurricane Katrina, and in Darfur.
Whether we’re building schools, making classrooms mobile, training teachers, or even rebuilding an entire educational system--we will do whatever it takes to educate a child.
Related Links
July 2, 2009
Girls' education in Afghanistan
These days, it takes more than textbooks and pencils to be a schoolgirl in Afghanistan—it also takes tremendous bravery and tenacity. "The first challenge for girls' education in Afghanistan is cultural barriers," according Fazlul Haque, UNICEF's Chief of Education for Afghanistan.
June 30, 2009
Youth gear up for Junior 8 Summit and G8 meeting
If you had the opportunity to tell the world's leaders what they should do to solve global problems, what would you say? That's the question youth delegates to the Junior 8 Summit will wrestle with as they prepare to meet with presidents and prime ministers from the G8 industrialized nations in Italy next month.
June 15, 2009
Maya's story: One child laborer in Nepal gets a fresh start
Maya was still shy of her 10th birthday when a labor contractor in her impoverished village in the south of Nepal promised her parents that she would receive a decent salary and an education in Kathmandu. What Maya got instead was a back-breaking job as a weaver in a carpet factory. Today, Maya, now 12, shudders when she talks about her old life in the carpet factory and how the contractor fooled her and her parents.
