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While the climate crisis affects every child, its impact is not felt equally. For the millions of learners with disabilities living in climate-vulnerable regions, a single extreme weather event – a flood, a cyclone, or a prolonged heatwave – can mean more than just a temporary break in schooling. It often marks the permanent end of their education. The data highlights a harsh reality: people with disabilities are disproportionately affected by climate change. This is not due to their impairments, but due to systemic failures in how we design our societies. The blog talks about a SightSavers pilot project in Bangaldesh and how it tackles this issue.

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In Kenya, adolescents growing up in informal settlements, such as Korogocho and Viwandani, face multiple barriers that affect their educational outcomes. These barriers include unstable household incomes, limited parental support for learning, and overcrowded schools.

For girls, the challenges are often compounded by gender norms, safety concerns and expectations around domestic responsibilities. As a result, many girls struggle to maintain consistent academic performance during the transition from primary to secondary school.

This blog talks about a change programme and its evaluation. It concludes: “Community-based interventions confirm that when programmes combine academic support, mentorship and parental engagement, they can make a meaningful difference in adolescents’ lives.”

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Many children are not leaving school just because of material or structural gaps. Even when those needs are met, some still cannot stay because they are surrounded by hunger, the threat of early marriage, conflict, grief, and pressure to provide for their families. These realities travel with them into the classroom.

If the goal is to retain children in school, serious attention must be paid to what pushes them out. Many are labelled “disruptive” when they are simply grieving or scared. These challenges go beyond poverty or infrastructure. They reflect emotional neglect in systems that prioritize performance over presence.

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In this blog, the authors share key insights from a desk review report that examined how GPE partner countries in Africa understand and operationalize education system resilience, the types of disruptions they face, and the strategies they use to sustain learning.

“Resilience is often framed in terms of systems, policies, infrastructure, and planning. However, the study makes it clear that resilience is also about considering who gets left behind. Gender inequality, poverty, and marginalization consistently shape who can continue learning during disruptions. Girls face increased risks of early marriage and dropout. Children from poorer households struggle with access to remote learning, while learners with disabilities are often excluded.”

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What does it take for a child to truly thrive? Ashish, a Teach For India alumnus and co-founder of Shiksharth Trust, reflects on how children growing up in adversity experience the world and what it means to create environments where they feel safe, loved, and able to learn.

Drawing from his experience teaching in a municipal school and working with children affected by conflict, poverty, and crisis, Ashish shares a powerful perspective on Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) and their role in shaping individuals who can contribute meaningfully to society.

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In Lao People’s Democratic Republic, many children struggle to develop foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Without a strong foundation, it becomes difficult to progress through the education system, which results in many children dropping out before secondary school. Targeted support is key to ensuring that the most disadvantaged children are not left behind. Efforts to support girls’ transition to, and retention in, lower secondary education are a key part of addressing learning disparities linked to gender, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.

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In this blog, R Chaudhry from Luminos argues that meaningful inclusion of children with learning differences in education systems must begin with effective instruction that benefits all children.

“The global push for inclusive education has rightly expanded who belongs in school, but it has largely avoided a harder question: when the majority of children in school do not achieve basic literacy, can access alone be meaningfully called inclusion?”

In many education systems, large numbers of children—especially those already facing disadvantage—spend years in school without mastering basic literacy or numeracy. In low- and middle-income countries, 70% of 10-year-olds cannot read or understand a simple text. The blog gives Luminos’ experiences with their own programme and toolkits to support teaching. It shows their successes and how to overcome barriers in low-income settings.

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This toolkit was co-developed by the Global Partnership for Education, Education International and UNICEF under Working Group 3 of the Greening Education Partnership (greening teacher training and education system capacities). It supports ministries of education to strengthen the climate resilience of their education systems by placing educators – teachers, school leaders, and education support personnel – at the centre of policy, planning, and implementation.

As part of the Greening Education Partnership, this publication complements existing resources on greening schools, curricula and communities, together offering a comprehensive package to mobilize education systems for a greener, more just and sustainable future.

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UNESCO’s 2026 GEM Report focuses on access and equity in education.

“A set of 35 country case studies drawn from rich data illustrates what happens when an international agenda meets national realities. The stories, supplemented by further research insights, show that change in education takes time; no single reform will address educational exclusion. Following the optimism of the 2000s, after fiscal restrictions had been lifted allowing many countries to invest in public education, the harder work of keeping students in school and dismantling the many constraints facing them has required more sophisticated action, often beyond education.”

Some statistics on inclusive education:

• 24% of countries now have inclusive education laws (up from 1% in 2000).

• As of 2025, 56% of countries have policies for inclusive education.

• 29% of countries explicitly mandate that children with disabilities must be taught in inclusive settings, while the share of countries whose legislation permits segregation has fallen to 9%.

• Fewer than 1 in 10 countries have a strong equity focus in their education financing systems.

Download the 2026 GEM report.

Read more information about the ‘Equitable Funding Index’ a tool presented in the 2026 GEM Report to assess the equity orientation of countries’ education systems.

“Three years ago, in March 2022, UKFIET published a blog I wrote on what I considered the most critical issue for poor children’s learning outcomes: teacher absenteeism… Three years on from the blog’s publication, I still cannot understand the silence surrounding this crisis. In 19 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa, teacher absenteeism rates range from 15% to 45%. In Uganda, recent data reveal a staggering reality: while teachers may be on the payroll, 52.3% were not actually teaching in the classroom when surveyed.”

The author describes the Power Teachers Africa model to address absenteeism through incentives.

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