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The latest global data reveal an alarming escalation in attacks on schools. In 2025, 1,680 attacks on schools were verified by the United Nations – an increase of 33% compared to 1,265 attacks in 2024. Nearly 80% of all out-of-school crisis-affected children – some 74 million – live in just 20 countries facing the world’s most severe crises. Within these settings, the barriers to learning are steepest for the most vulnerable: 74% of refugee children, 52% of internally displaced children, and 45% of children with disabilities are out of school.

Read UNESCO’s press release from International Day to Protect Education from Attack.

Across Africa, millions of children are trying to learn in the midst of conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and chronic underfunding. The Global Campaign for Education’s podcast series, ‘Learning Under Crisis: Community Voices on Education in Emergencies in Africa’, takes listeners inside these realities. Drawing on insights from GCE’s Africa Education in Emergencies (EiE) study in seven crisis-affected countries, the series focuses on experiences from Nigeria, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Mozambique.

In the English-language episode, “Beyond Humanitarian Response: Investing in Education in Emergencies in Nigeria and South Sudan”, Nigerian policy advisor Odinakachi Ahanonu (CSACEFA) and South Sudanese teacher Kuei Yolanda Paul share what it takes to keep classrooms open when schools are attacked, flooded, or abandoned and teachers go unpaid.

The French episode is about the reopening of education structures for over 432,000 internally displaced learners in Burkina Faso, securing a national strategy for education in emergencies in DRC despite major funding gaps, and the realities of overcrowded classrooms and traumatised learners in Chad.

Read more information and access the podcast. 

Education Cannot Wait (ECW) announced a US$3 million emergency investment to bring children in Gaza and the West Bank back to safe, inclusive, and supportive learning, channelled through Palestinian national organisations and local partners. For a third year, 660,000 children in Gaza are out of school, and 70,000 of the youngest are left without access to preschool.

Read the press release.

[EENET director’s note: We’ve shared this item to share facts and figures, but encourage our readers to read articles like this with a critical eye. For example, be mindful that in this article, ECW fails to explicitly mention the actions of the genocidal, Israeli apartheid state that have caused so many Palestinian children to be injured and out of education.]

Violence, displacement, movement restrictions and incidents affecting schools and surrounding communities are disrupting thousands of children’s ability to reach and remain in education safely. Ten Palestinian children were killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during the summer break between June and the first week of September 2026. In addition, since the start of the year, more than 1,700 Palestinian children have been displaced due to settler violence, access restrictions, and administrative demolitions.

Read this blog by UNICEF.

[EENET director’s note: We’ve shared this blog to share facts and figures, but encourage our readers to read blogs like this with a critical eye. For example, be mindful that in this blog, UNICEF continues to fail to openly tell us who killed the Palestinian children. They talk about ‘incidents’ but fail to explicitly mention the actions of the genocidal, Israeli apartheid state.]

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.

Read the blog.

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.

Read the blog.

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.

To read the blog. 

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.”

Read the blog.

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.

Read the report.