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The funding for these projects is provided by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and Education Cannot Wait (ECW), supporting 1,600 centres and 100 centres, respectively. This initiative is set to benefit over 96,000 children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

UNICEF has a long-standing partnership with the E&SED, offering technical and financial assistance to enhance educational opportunities, particularly for girls, and to improve education service delivery through evidence-based planning. Their collaboration focuses on multiple areas, including access, equity, inclusion, quality, governance, and management of education. 

Today, Lyceum No.1 is one of the few educational institutions in the Mykolaivska region that is fully operational. Currently, more than 700 students study here, including children from neighboring villages and internally displaced children from areas where shelling continues.

To help ensure their safety, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN global fund Education Cannot Wait (ECW) have installed shatter-resistant film (SRF) on the windows. It is one of 23 schools in Ukraine’s Mykolaivska and Odeska regions to have received the SRF, which is vital amid the daily threat of shelling and unexploded ordnance. 

The show, which has just launched its second series on TV, online and radio, is hosted by BBC female journalists who themselves fled Kabul more than two years ago, after the Taliban's return to power.

Any form of learning "provides safety hope and opportunity", says Yasmine Sherif, the executive director of Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations global fund for the education of children in crisis.

"Community-based education or remote learning, such as the BBC's Dars programme, offers them the learning lifeline which they so desperately need," she adds.

Pour apporter une réponse au phénomène de non-scolarisation ou de déscolarisation, les jeunes ambassadeurs de la rentrée scolaire contribuent à renforcer le dialogue dans leurs communautés sur l’importance de l’éducation grâce à des activités de porte-à-porte, des émissions radiophoniques et des séances de dialogue communautaire. De 2019 à 2023, 286 598 enfants hors de l’école (dont 120 375 filles) ont été insérés/réinsérés grâce à l’Unicef avec l’appui financier de l’Allemagne, l’Autriche, Education cannot wait (l’Éducation ne peut pas attendre), le fonds de Consolidation pour la paix, la Norvège, le Partenariat mondial pour l’éducation (PME), UNICEF Espagne, et l’Union Européenne.

The “Multi-annual Resilience Program” MYRP, for its acronym in English, seeks to improve the resilience of the educational system to guarantee the right to education of children and adolescents, migrants and the host community, in a context of crisis in the educational sector affected by high rates of violence and insecurity, natural disasters linked to the climate change crisis and the post-pandemic effects that impact both learning levels and mental health.

The MYRP will be implemented with a seed fund of 8 million granted by the “Education Cannot Wait” fund during the period 2024 – 2026 and requires the selection of a recipient (“grantee”) of the fund to manage the resources and develop the proposal of the program. The grantee can be a consortium or an organization that has both technical and territorial capacity.

Girls are the future. They are agents of positive change and potential in a world torn apart by conflicts and chaos. On this International Day of the Girl Child, Education Cannot Wait joins girls, women and people everywhere in calling for an end to the oppression of girls, an end to gender-based violence and sexual abuse, an end to child marriage, an end to unpaid work and an end to any form of subjugation. Our voices will not be silenced.

Girls are the future. They are agents of positive change and potential in a world torn apart by conflicts and chaos. On this International Day of the Girl Child, Education Cannot Wait joins girls, women and people everywhere in calling for an end to the oppression of girls, an end to gender-based violence and sexual abuse, an end to child marriage, an end to unpaid work and an end to any form of subjugation. Our voices will not be silenced.

Girls are the future. They are agents of positive change and potential in a world torn apart by conflicts and chaos. On this International Day of the Girl Child, Education Cannot Wait joins girls, women and people everywhere in calling for an end to the oppression of girls, an end to gender-based violence and sexual abuse, an end to child marriage, an end to unpaid work and an end to any form of subjugation. Our voices will not be silenced.

It is important to note that UNHCR and the Ministries of Education do not yet have comprehensive data on the enrolment of refugee children in Cameroon, as they are enrolled in hundreds of schools spread across the country and the education partner cannot cover all of these institutions. As for the Ministries of Education, due to a lack of knowledge of refugee documentation, a large number of children are registered as refugees without having refugee status. As part of Education Cannot Wait's multi-year resilience programme, 477 head teachers have benefited from capacity building on refugee status documentation. This awareness-raising will continue to improve the quality of data on refugee education.

While the number of school-age refugees increased by almost 6% between 2022 and 2023, putting further pressure on the fragile education system, the NER of refugees still increased slightly (by ½ and 1½ points at primary and secondary levels respectively). However, the rates remain below the 2025 targets set by the Ministry of Education and UNHCR in the 2030 Refugee Education Strategy for Chad, especially at primary level (47% against a target of 70%).

Thanks to support from Education Cannot Wait, Education Above All Foundation and the CERF, UNHCR has been able to scale up the construction of classrooms and latrines, cash-for-education interventions, distribution of textbooks and school kits, and support to teachers.

Millions of school-aged children, adolescents and their teachers in countries of brutal conflicts, devastating climate disasters and refuge are calling out for our action today. Their mental health cannot wait. They need support now to restore the foundation for learning.

Conflicts, climate disasters and flight severely impact their brain development and their ability to focus, learn and develop their potentials. In the absence of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), their education risks being lost, hence the loss of their very last hope.

Only a very few survive and thrive without professional support. This is why Education Cannot Wait has made MHPSS a top priority. All our investments integrate mental health and psychosocial services across all age-groups – from early childhood development through secondary school. Their teachers are part of the support too.  

As we unite behind universal human rights this World Mental Health Day, let it not be just another day of commemoration without action. Let us instead heed their calls and take action. We can make a difference by funding education in emergencies and protracted crises and joining the Education Cannot Wait community. We can do so with full confidence that MHPSS will be an integral part of a holistic and inclusive quality education.

By ensuring girls and boys can access mental health and psychosocial services, by providing teachers the training they need to work on the frontlines of the world's worst humanitarian crises, and by providing protection for children that have lived through these life-changing ordeals, we provide a whole-of-child solution for quality education.

It's not just our way of addressing the world's mental health crisis, it's part and parcel of addressing the education crisis.