Mr. Adel Abdul Raheem, Director General of Education in the Iraqi central government considered that “UNESCO’s effort to provide emergency education and humanitarian response is aligned with the needs and priorities of the Government of Iraq”. “UNESCO’s support to the Ministries of Education will allow us to reach out to more than 10,000 out-of-school children and youth in this critical situation in Iraq”, he added, emphasizing that proceeding with the phase II of the EACI is “very crucial for responding to educational needs in current humanitarian crisis in Iraq”. “The phase II will bring up to 150,000 out-of-school children back into schools”, said the Director General. “This second phase is essential to avoid more Iraqi children falling out of school, which will affect Iraq dramatically, and leave it behind in terms of achieving the Millennium Development Goal 2 of achieving universal primary education”.
Moreover, focal point of EACI project in Ministry of Education at the central government, Dr. Abed Zaid, warned that “Iraq had 94% enrollment rate, which is reduced to 78%, and if necessary support is not provided, it will further decrease due to the political and security situation in the country”.
Iraq is now contending with one of the largest numbers of IDPs in the world. Over a million people have been displaced since January this year and approximately 560,000 of these have been displaced from Anbar. Following the security and political crisis in Ninewa, Diyala, Salah-al Din in June and August 2014, an additional 1,150,000 persons are estimated to have been displaced. According to UN statistics (August 2014), there are about 1.6 million displaced people in Iraq. These crisis will result in these children will never start school and those who do are at risk of dropping out.
UNESCO policy paper shows that 58 million children aged 6 to 11 are still out of school around the world, showing little overall improvement since 2007. The new global out-of-school figures, produced by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), show that around 43% of those out of school –15 million girls and 10 million boys – are unlikely ever to set foot in a classroom if current crisis trends continue.
(Source: UNESCO)
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