Education in Emergencies & Conflict

This case study focuses on two factors that affect displaced children’s ability to exercise their right to education: poverty and discrimination.

The INEE Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, Response, Recovery (INEE MS) contains 19 standards, each of which includes key actions and guidance notes. The purpose of the INEE MS is to improve the quality of educational preparedness, response, and recovery; to increase access to safe and relevant learning opportunities; and to ensure that the actors who provide these services are held accountable.

Since the beginnings of 2012, at least 70 teachers and over 100 students have been killed or wounded in northern Nigeria. Educational facilities have been burned, thousands of children forced out of schools and teachers made to flee for safety. The purpose of this briefing is to draw attention to the damaging effects of this on-going violence. It calls on the Islamist armed group Boko Haram and other gunmen to immediately cease all attacks on schools; and on the Nigerian authorities to provide better protection for schools and ensure that attacks are properly investigated.

Around the world, armies and rebel groups are taking over schools and universities, turning safe places of learning into places of war. In classrooms, soldiers sleep and store weapons. In school offices, they detain and torture suspects. Playgrounds become training grounds. School grounds become battlegrounds.

This video is to accompany the End Military Use of Schools Campaign (EMUS) led by Human Rights Watch Student Task Force, Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division and Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

This global study examines threats or deliberate use of force against students, teachers, academics, education trade union members, government officials, aid workers and other education staff, and against schools, universities and other education institutions, carried out for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic or religious reasons in 2009-2013; and military use of education buildings and facilities.

This study examines the use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by government armed forces and opposition or pro-government armed groups during times of armed conflict or insecurity. Schools are used for barracks, logistics bases, operational headquarters, weapons and ammunition caches, detention and interrogation centres, firing and observation positions, and recruitment grounds.

This publication considers how attacks on education during insecurity and armed conflict have been redressed in the past and may be redressed in the future. In identifying innovative approaches and new trends in the field of reparation, it reflects on how education can be used as a means of reparation and as a means to minimise the risk of conflicts recurring. In doing so, the publication brings together wide-ranging examples of law and practice from the international, regional and domestic spheres through an analysis of the relevant law in each sphere.

This publication identifies trends in the practice and contribution of UN human rights mechanisms to the protection of education in times of insecurity and armed conflict and offers recommendations on how such protection might be strengthened.

This video presents the work of the Education Cluster and the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE). The vision of both bodies is to enable all children and young people to have immediate access or ensured continuity to a quality education in a safe environment, in order to protect, develop and facilitate a return to normality and stability.

The Regional Forum on the Protection of the Right to Education during Insecurity and Armed Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa Region was organized from 19-21 January 2014 in  Jordan as one of the main activities of a joint project between the United Nations Training and Documentation Centre for South-west Asia and the Arab Region (OHCHR-Doha Centre) and Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict (PEIC) – a program of Education Above All Foundation.

The  report final provides information on the forum: its objectives, its findings and recommendations.