Blog

This blog from Save the Children highlights that girls in many low‑resource and climate‑affected regions have significantly lower climate‑change awareness than boys, largely due to gendered barriers in education and access to information.

Climate disasters disrupt schooling and increase risks such as violence, early marriage and dropout, disproportionately affecting girls. Without climate education, girls are less able to anticipate risks, adapt, or participate in community decision‑making.

The author argues that climate education is essential for gender equality, resilience and effective climate action. Schools, communities and governments must integrate gender‑responsive climate learning, build climate‑resilient education systems, and ensure girls are included as leaders in adaptation efforts.

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Across Africa, 98 million children cannot get into a classroom — not for lack of will, but for lack of money. When a family in rural Niger or eastern DRC must choose between feeding children and schooling them, feeding wins. When the cost of transport to the nearest school exceeds a daily wage, children stay home. When a girl’s safety cannot be guaranteed on a five-kilometre walk, she does not make the walk. These are not failures of parental love or ambition. They are rational responses to impossible economic conditions. The price of educational exclusion — in lost human potential, in foregone economic growth, in preventable suffering — is incalculable. The 98 million children currently out of school are not a statistic. They are individuals whose lives will be defined, in significant part, by whether the adults and institutions around them choose to act with the urgency this crisis demands.

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The authors of this blog argue that Global South must help design and govern AIEd, not just receive it. AI systems frequently prioritize dominant languages and knowledge systems, marginalizing indigenous or local knowledge, reinforcing global hierarchies of knowledge production. They also reinforce gender norms: even when AI programs target inclusion, structural barriers, including norms around mobility, time use, safety, and financial autonomy, limit women’s participation. Women are underrepresented not just as users but as creators, designers, and decisionmakers in AI systems. The absence of women from the design of AIEd, reinforces gender bias embedded in datasets and systems.

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In this blog, the author highlights learning from Sightwaver’s projects on climate-resilient education. He writes:

“For millions of learners with disabilities living in particularly climate-vulnerable regions, a single extreme weather event – a flood, a cyclone or a prolonged heatwave – frequently marks the permanent end of their education. As governments, the INGO sector and the wider international community strive to build “climate-resilient” education systems, we must ask a critical, often overlooked question: resilient for whom? Sightsavers is piloting operational models to demonstrate how inclusive climate action functions in practice. This builds on our previous work under Inclusive Futures (the UK aid-funded flagship disability inclusion initiative) which successfully integrated inclusive policies across 2,444 schools to reach 490,000 students across Narsingdi and Sirajganj in Bangladesh. Following on from this, we have launched a targeted pilot initiative in another part of the country: Sarankhola Upazila.”

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Six outstanding literacy programmes from Colombia, Lebanon, Mexico, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Nigeria and Thailand have been awarded the UNESCO International Literacy Prizes for their exceptional contributions to advancing literacy across the globe.

One winner was The ‘Escuelas LEO’ Programme by the ‘BibloRed’ (Colombia). Launched in 2024 by BibloRed, the programme provides intercultural and multilingual literacy opportunities for marginalized communities in Bogotá, including Indigenous Peoples, Deaf communities, migrants, displaced populations and LGBTIQ+ groups.

Another winner was ‘Project PAL’ (Primary Accelerated Literacy) by the WAER Waters Charity Foundation (Nigeria). Launched in 2023 by the Waer Waters Charity Foundation, a Nigerian NGO addressing learning poverty among out-of-school children in conflict-affected areas of the Niger Delta, the programme provides foundational literacy to children who are out of school and have limited access to education. It combines solar-powered ‘Literacy Hubs’ for safe learning spaces, teaching in indigenous languages before transitioning to English, and a ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ approach that groups learners by ability.

Read more and about the other winners.

Learning Interrupted: Global Snapshot of Climate-Related School Disruptions in 2025 analyses data from 106 countries or territories and finds that climate hazards, including storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires, led to suspended classes, damaged schools, a shift to remote learning, shortened instructional time, reduced school attendance, and increased risk of dropout for millions of students worldwide.

According to the analysis, storms were the most common cause of school disruptions last year, affecting 109 million students globally. Floods affected at least 70 million students, while heatwaves disrupted schooling for approximately 50 million children. Girls are at greater risk of dropping out when climate hazards disrupt or close schools. Damage to schools and sanitation facilities, displacement and lost family income can place additional caregiving and water-collection responsibilities on girls. At the same time, the report highlights practical solutions that are already helping protect learning from climate hazards, including integrating climate resilience into national education planning, strengthening school infrastructure, ensuring learning continuity during and after disruptions, and embedding climate education into curricula to equip children and young people with the skills needed to adapt to a changing world.

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After drought destroyed Layla’s family livelihood and forced them to leave home, Layla struggled to access education. Layla never stopped dreaming of going to school. When neighbours told the family about a nearby school where she could enrol through a free scholarship programme for girls, she seized the opportunity. For families facing financial hardship, scholarships can make the difference between girls staying at home and entering the classroom. Scholarships alone cannot remove every barrier to girls’ education. The GPE-funded programme takes a comprehensive approach, combining scholarships with capitation grants for public schools, menstrual hygiene management, new school construction, improved water and sanitation facilities, and community engagement.

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In the Federated States of Micronesia, Wayfinding is an education reform programme that brings Indigenous knowledge, languages, values and traditional ways of learning into the curriculum, teacher development and classroom practice. A nationwide mapping of indigenous and traditional knowledge resources has identified existing materials and resource gaps, laying the foundation for the development of culturally relevant teaching and learning materials in the next phase of the programme. The Wayfinding team is helping children, educators and community elders recognize the value of their cultures, languages and traditional knowledge by bringing Indigenous concepts into what students learn every day at school.

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For years, Moldova offered little structured professional development for educators working with its youngest children. Early education services existed, but professionals caring for children aged 0–3 rarely had access to specialized training tailored to this decisive stage of development.

Since 2023, the Moldova Early Education Initiative has worked to close this gap by professionalizing the early childhood workforce. These educators now support approximately 5,240 children across the country, including Ukrainian refugee children and children living in rural and underserved communities. Educators working in settings that also support Ukrainian refugee children are equipped to support increasingly diverse classrooms, ensuring that investments in workforce capacity benefit both host communities and refugee families. At the same time, educators are being equipped to recognize and respond to diverse needs within the classroom including developmental delays, psychosocial needs, safeguarding concerns, and the effects of displacement and trauma.

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In Luang Namtha Province in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), summer camps combine fun and learning. The camps help children – especially girls at the critical transition from primary to lower secondary – stay engaged with education, build confidence, strengthen friendships and prepare for a successful return to school after the holidays. First year program results are encouraging: of the 800 vulnerable girls supported through Foundational Learning Improvement Project, only one dropped out of school during the 2025–2026 academic year, highlighting the project’s success in keeping girls in school.

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