Author:

Presentation given at INEE / GCE webinar 16 June 2025

 Ingrid Lewis, EENET Managing Director

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this event alongside such a great panel of speakers.

Writing – rather than speaking – is my passion, particularly writing about education and learning. I love using writing to stimulate conversations, debates, arguments. But when it comes to Palestine, and especially the last 20 months in Gaza, writing is a responsibility – and one that we all carry.

Writing about Gaza isn’t just a process of reporting facts but a process of conviction, endurance, and bravery. I’ll unpack this a bit in my presentation.

About EENET

Briefly, for those who don’t know EENET, the Enabling Education Network, started 28 years ago to support global dialogue on inclusive education. In our founding principles, we promise to create conversations, swim upstream, challenge the status quo, help people to leave their comfort zones, and, if necessary, make people feel uncomfortable. This is how we believe change happens.

Writing about Palestine

EENET has been writing its own content and publishing other people’s articles about the educational impact of Israel’s occupation in Palestine for many years. In October 2023, we automatically increased our written and verbal advocacy because it quickly became clear that education in Gaza was being attacked by Israel on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, we saw weak statements coming from well-known organisations.

NGOs are often among the first to highlight when governments and the media are not being transparent. They’re the first on the scene in crises and conflicts. They fight for education to be given attention in emergencies when others ignore it. NGOs’ insights and analyses carry weight with authorities and the public, so they shoulder a huge communication responsibility.

So it was somewhat shocking and disappointing that, for many months after October 2023, numerous NGOs tiptoed around the topic of what Israel was doing to the people and education system in Gaza. Many NGOs mirrored the mainstream media’s opaque narrative style. School children were “dying” rather than being killed by Israeli forces. Schools were “being bombed”, but the name of the bomber wasn’t mentioned.

Many forgot simply to inform their supporters about the context of decades of Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid policies and denial of Palestinian human rights.

Why so much reluctance?

EENET’s mission is to rock the boat in order to stimulate debate and change. So I’ve found it hard to understand NGO reluctance to speak out on Gaza – especially once the genocide became so obvious. We’re all supposed to be champions of the most marginalised, aren’t we, so why so much fear around championing this group of oppressed people?

I get that talking about Palestine feels tricky. There’s the constant threat that you will be called antisemitic or a Hamas supporter if you criticise Israel.

Many of us have been raised in a media culture that has dehumanised Palestinian suffering for decades, and now consistently perpetuates Israel’s narrative that it is just defending itself, that the deaths of school children are terrible accidents, and that mass starvation is not the intended outcome of blocking all access to food.

But NGOs should know better than what they see in the media. So, what caused many NGOs to gag themselves and abandon their trademark bravery?

I’ve heard the excuse that funding or permission for their global programmes will be put at risk if the NGO upsets a key donor or government over “just” this one issue.

Some have said they fear their organisation’s reputation will be damaged if the media twists their messages about Gaza into being somehow antisemitic or pro-terror.

Others have said they don’t feel well enough informed, so they’ll stick to the basics rather than risk mentioning the context of apartheid, colonialism or genocide.

By contrast, people have told me that it’s easy for EENET to be vocal because we’re financially tiny, so we have nothing to lose. By implication, I guess they assume EENET would remain silent if we actually had a multi-million-dollar budget to worry about. I can guarantee we wouldn’t remain silent!

Fearless conversations

My presentation is entitled Fearless Conversations, so I just wanted to share what I think we need to see more of, if our sector is going to show less fear and more conviction and endurance in relation to messaging on education and other human rights in Gaza.

Palestinians have faced ethnic cleansing, occupation and human rights abuses since the Nakba of 1948. Many people simply don’t know about this because historical narratives are dominated by the colonial powers rather than the voices of the colonised. To support learners and teachers in Gaza, we must seek out their voices, believe them, and provide a platform to be heard, without censoring their messages, especially when they raise the historical context. We have a responsibility – and NGOs have the skills – to match up the authentic voices of oppressed people with what we know about international law.

Rather than staying silent or only conveying weak messages because we fear reprisals, we need to come out and name the fear. We should tell our supporters what risks we are taking by speaking out for Gaza. Encourage them – or give them the opportunity – to join us in opposing restrictions and saying “no” to fear.

We have seen a growth in joint Gaza statements by organisations; a strength-in-numbers approach to communicating. But these still tend to be rather stand-alone statements – not the constant drumming that’s needed. There are organisations that can and will constantly speak out loudly against apartheid, genocide and colonialism. If your organisation can’t directly speak out enough, for whatever reason, work with those who can. Lend practical and financial support to organisations that specialise in persistent, hard-hitting messages.

Conclusion

I want to acknowledge that many organisations are writing and sharing excellent, powerful messages on Gaza generally and the education situation specifically.  For everyone already speaking and writing, keep it up and do more. EENET will willingly help to share your content.

For anyone still sitting on the communication fence, please jump off now. While you’re stressing about trying to choose appropriate words, school children are being murdered and schools are being destroyed. What we don’t say now will come back to haunt us as much as what we do say. So please create those conversations, and be fearless about it!

 

Find out more about EENET:

EENET website: https://www.eenet.org.uk/

EENET Arabic site: https://arabic.eenet.org.uk/

Sign up to EENET’s mailing list: https://www.eenet.org.uk/get-involved/sign-up/

Follow EENET on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eenet-enabling-education-network/

 

In February, EENET featured a blog from the organisation, ONG RENAISSANCE AFRICAINE RENAF, KIVU, Bukavu Office, South Kivu, DRC. They have kept us up-to-date with the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and have now written with an urgent message:

“Sexual violence is reaching alarming levels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, with nearly 2,000 rapes recorded in two weeks from February 2025 to May 15, 2025, in South Kivu Province/DRC. In 2024, more than 130,000 cases were reported, more than 70% of which were in the provinces of North and South Kivu. This violence, used as a weapon of war by armed groups and loyalist forces, aims to break up local communities. Survivors, mostly women and girls, struggle to access emergency care as there are no medications in health centers in combatant areas.”

They continue: “In South Kivu (DRC) and North Kivu, this humanitarian crisis is also affecting children, who are suffering appalling violence. Two two-year-old children were raped on May 10, 2025, in Kalonge by the Wazalendo in Mule.” They describe further examples of rape and sexual violence, torture, and death.

Children make up 35% to 45% of the nearly 10,000 cases of rape and sexual violence reported January and February this year, James Elder, the spokesperson for UNICEF told reporters in Geneva: “In short, based on initial data (…) a child was raped every half an hour.”

Children are abducted and recruited by armed groups. UNICEF reported in 2023:

“Recruitment and use of children in armed groups has spiked by 45 per cent in the first six months of the year. In 2022, 1,545 children – some as young as 5 years old – were verified as having been recruited and used by armed groups.”

In March this year, UNICEF wrote:

“The number of incidents [of grave violations against children] has tripled from December since the latest escalation of violence which began on 24 January 2025. During this period, data reveals that cases of sexual violence have risen by more than two and a half times, abductions have increased sixfold, killing and maiming is up sevenfold, and attacks on schools and hospitals have multiplied by 12.”

All this has a devastating impact on children’s education. Schools had to close, were destroyed or used as emergency shelters. Children had to flee their homes together with their parents. Only a minority of children in displacements camps receive education. There are only a few facilities that allow children to sit final exams to obtain a formal qualification. In North and South Kivu, more than 2,500 schools and learning spaces are closed, affecting 795,000 children.

In an article on “Broken Chalk”, Z. Alford writes:

“This current situation unravels decades of progress in the DRC, where great strides had been made … to create universal access to education. Access to primary school education has increased significantly in the last few decades, with net attendance rates increasing from 52% in 2001 to 78% in 2018 (UNICEF, 2024).”

The DRC still faces significant issues around education, with children from poorer backgrounds and 50% of girls not able to attend school despite the promise of free primary education. For those children going to school, the quality of teaching might be low due to insufficient budget and fraud, and teachers who have to have second or even third jobs to get a sufficient income.

“Many of the 500,000 teachers in the country have gone without government pay for many years, leaving parents responsible to supplement their pay.” (ibid)

In an opinion piece, S May and J Kimmelman write:

“If we do not address the root causes of instability, the cycle of violence will persist. One of these root causes is the dire state of education in North and South Kivu.”’

In North and South Kivu, even as far back as 25 years ago, 42% of children had never attended school. In the DRC as a whole, 91% of 10-year-olds cannot read and understand simple texts.

“Think about what that means: an entire nation where the vast majority of children are functionally illiterate. If eastern Congo continues to be a place where nearly half of all children never set foot in a classroom, or at best a place where they attend school but fail to learn, the conditions for conflict will persist.” (ibid)

ONG RENAISSANCE AFRICAINE RENAF, KIVU en RDC continues to work in the DRC and in North and South Kivu. They are now aiming to distribute resilience kits to women. They continue to speak out.

For more information on the situation and how to support ONG RENAISSANCE AFRICAINE RENAF, KIVU en RDC in South Kivu please contact Mr Laurent Balagizi at: renafsudkivu@gmail.com.

Post script: The organisation provided another update. The fighting continues, civilians have been murdered, property looted. Malnutrition of children is on the rise and cases of cholera have been reported at the Ndolera mine in Luhihi.