GENEVA, Dec. 13,
2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at the Global Refugee
Forum, we reaffirm our commitment to alleviate human suffering and
serve humanity. We stand with refugee children and adolescents
everywhere. We will steadfastly continue to work with all our
partners and invest in a quality education that provides knowledge,
skills, mental health and psychosocial support, school meals, water
and sanitation, as well as protection.
As part of this commitment, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), as the
global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, is
pledging to invest at least US$500
million in refugee education over the next four years,
contingent upon ECW raising at least US$1.5
billion for its new Strategic Plan. By doing so, ECW will
reach 5 million refugees worldwide.
ECW's support will be geared towards addressing the most
immediate and urgent needs through temporary education programmes –
as well as supporting long-term stability through inclusion of
refugees and refugee teachers in national education systems, in
ways that respect their diverse needs, abilities and
capacities.
We cannot do it alone. To build on this work, the Government of
Denmark has committed an
additional DKK40 million
(approximately US$6 million) towards
Education Cannot Wait's investments in Niger. The Government of Japan is also announcing a US$3 million grant that will help provide safe
and protective learning environments for children that have been
forcibly displaced in the war in Ukraine. We welcome Japan as a G7 leader to the ECW family, and
look forward to strengthened collaboration and support in the years
to come.
Together with other contributions by our strategic donors, and
through working with government partners, UN partners such as UNHCR
and other UN agencies, civil society and other key stakeholders,
ECW will mobilize a total of US$1.5
billion by 2026, allowing us to reach 20 million
crisis-impacted children and adolescents through our holistic
education investments.
This is a crisis that impacts us all. The global level of forced
displacement is reaching all-time highs. The number of people
forced to flee their homes due to armed conflict and
climate-induced disasters has increased every year over the past
decade – to roughly 115 million people today. That's more than the
total populations of Canada,
Denmark, Italy and Switzerland combined.
Together with all our partners, ECW must act with speed and
agility to restore education as quickly as possible for refugee
children and adolescents, to minimize learning losses and restore a
sense of normalcy for girls and boys whose lives have been torn
apart by armed conflicts, persecution and climate-induced
disasters.
This is what we did as South Sudanese refugees arrived in
Uganda, Rohingya refugees in
Bangladesh and Venezuelan
refugees in Colombia. This is what
we are doing in response to the brutal conflict in Sudan. Through our First Emergency Responses,
we jointly provide education to refugee children and adolescents
uprooted by the war, and their host communities in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt,
Ethiopia and South Sudan.
At the same time, it is critically important to ensure that
refugees, including refugee teachers, are included in national
education systems and that we ensure sustainability. Together with
our partners, we work closely with refugee-hosting countries such
as Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Lebanon, and many others to help develop
policies and frameworks that support and facilitate inclusion,
while also alleviating the pressure on national education systems
by making additional investments in the formal sector.
In delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals, especially
SDG4 – the foundation of all sustainable development goals – we are
committed to advancing inclusion across all our investments. To
bridge the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, our multi-year
investments connect immediate humanitarian response plans with
medium and long-term national sector strategies.
Ultimately, refugee inclusion is not only an opportunity to
strengthen national education systems for refugees and host
community children and adolescents. It is an opportunity to ignite
change through empowering those whose extraordinary resilience will
help all of us to advance human evolution in science, technology,
medicine and the arts, just to mention a few. The greatest minds
and souls are to be found in refugees and those who have offered
them refuge.
Since operations commenced in 2017, almost one-third of the
children ECW has reached are refugees. We will not stop.
As a member of the Leadership Group and a longstanding partner
of UNHCR, we wholeheartedly support the multi-stakeholder pledge
made at this year's Global Refugee Forum, along with the various
thematic pledges that have been developed under the auspices of the
Education Alliance – including pledges towards early childhood
development, education in emergencies, gender, mental health and
psychosocial support, secondary education and teachers.
With our own individual pledge, we are coming in strongly behind
the education mega-pledge issued during the Global Refugee Forum,
articulating what we as ECW can and will do to help achieve our
shared vision.
To make good on the commitments outlined in the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development, the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967
Protocol, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other
binding international accords, world leaders must step up to do
more for the world's refugee children and adolescents. Their only
dream is a safe place to call home, their only hope is an
education. And our own hope lies with them.
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SOURCE Education Cannot Wait