500 Million Children Need Education as UN Meet Yields $3.5 Billion

More than 500 million children worldwide are in urgent need of education, a crisis that has moved to the forefront of this week's gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, where appeals for funding have begun to show results.

Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister now serving as the UN special envoy for global education, said 273 million children are not in school, while another 270 million attend classes but are not learning enough to read, write or handle arithmetic by age 11. Many live in regions affected by conflict or climate change.

"Instead of the world developing only some of the potential of some children in some countries, we must be determined to develop the potential of all children at all times in every country," Brown said, describing the gap between current progress and the goal of quality education for all children by 2030 as vast.

He noted that governments with out-of-school children had pledged 20% of their spending to education, and that donor countries had signed up to the 2030 development goals in 2015. Brown warned that denying a child the right to education affects their entire life and the lives of those around them.

The diplomatic push produced concrete commitments. At an event on Wednesday, the Global Partnership for Education said $3.5 billion had been mobilized to help more than 90 lower-income countries transform their education systems. Of that, $2.1 billion came from confirmed and anticipated pledges by governments and private donors, while $1.4 billion was in co-financing — $1 billion from development finance institutions and $400 million from philanthropic and private sector partners.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, a co-host of the campaign, said the funding would help dynamic and youthful nations like Nigeria break down barriers that keep children, especially girls, out of school.

Maysa Jalbout, director of Education Can't Wait, which targets the 258 million school-age children affected by crises, described a recent visit to a school in war-torn Sudan. In a sixth-grade classroom where the temperature reached 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) with no water or electricity, a teacher instructed 120 children. Among them was an 18-year-old girl displaced three years earlier by fighting, married and made a mother too soon, but determined to complete her education. She pleaded with Jalbout to ensure her siblings, cousins and orphaned friends could also attend school.

Hundreds more children waited outside the small school and asked visitors to press for more schools to be built. Jalbout said she has been carrying that message to the UN meeting.

Her organization announced a $3 million emergency investment for children in Gaza and the West Bank, aiming to reach up to 13,000 of the most vulnerable, with priority for those with conflict-related injuries and disabilities and for children who have lost parents and are unaccompanied or separated. Gaza now has more child amputees per capita than anywhere in the world.

"For these children, survival is only the beginning — a child who has survived this war, lost a limb and perhaps lost their family should not also lose their future because we failed to organize around their needs," Jalbout said.

For a third year, 660,000 children remain out of school in Gaza, and about 70,000 of the youngest have no access to preschool. Education Can't Wait also provided $1 million to help children affected by Nepal's recent devastating floods resume learning. During her Sudan trip, Jalbout announced $22 million in funding to help several hundred thousand children, but 8 million youngsters remain out of school there.