About Schooling...

One Million Bones has four really fantastic interns from Amy Biehl High School, which is located just a few blocks away from our office.  Amy Biehl is a year-round school, and this week marks the first week of their fall break.  These girls are busy.  They take high school classes, college classes, are responsible for 100 hours of community service, and some of them work jobs, too. And then of course, there’s an American teenager’s social life.

That got me thinking about education for kids in IDP camps.  What does that look like?  Do children in the camps even have the opportunity to go to school?  Those questions and the miracle of “google” brought me to this: A report by the Population Council and Women’s Refugee Commission on Schooling and Conflict in Darfur: A Snapshot of Basic Education Services for Displaced Children.

This is an excerpt from the preface:

“Education has been long neglected in emergency relief efforts. In 2007, Save the Children estimated that more than 39 million children and youth who are affected by armed conflict do not have access to education. In mid-2007, the Women’s Refugee Commission (formerly called the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children) approached the Population Council about conducting research on the protective role of education in conflict. The result was a collaboration between the two organizations on a research project in Darfur, Sudan. The Darfur region has been significantly affected by displacement from ongoing conflict. Given the large size of the affected population, the level of international involvement, and the documented violations against children and youth, Darfur serves as a compelling case study of the extent of educational coverage for primary-school-age children in this setting as well as certain basic elements of educational quality. The ultimate goal of the project was to improve the well-being of displaced children and youth through increasing the provision of quality and safe education.”

This link will take you to the report in its entirety.

And, this is from a blog about the school situation in Dadaab Camp near Somalia.

“In one of the largest and oldest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the 90,739 children who live there.

Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab – Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley – are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95 percent of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily.”

This link will take you to the website where you can read the entire blog.