Attachments
ABSTRACT
In 2018, the Technical Cooperation Group on Sustainable Development Goal 4 indicators (TCG) adopted GCPEA’s attacks on education (AoE) data for affected countries for reporting on the thematic indicator 4.a.3 (‘Number of attacks on students, personnel and institutions’), under target 4.a on safe learning environments. Counting incidents reflects both a principled stance that ‘an attack on education is an attack on education’ and limitations in the input data, which often cannot be disaggregated by the precise type of attack or its consequences. Still, it disagrees with the intuition that behind the same overall count of attacks may stand very different scenarios with divergent protection needs. Based on a review of the literature, consultations with key informants, and examples of other indices, this report seeks to explore methodological options for complementing counts of attacks on education with a measure of their severity, combining different aspects of attacks on education into an index. Further, the report proposes a feasible structure for a Severity Index of attacks on education, together with suggestions on how to populate the structure with existing data. Data from Burkina Faso is scored using preliminary criteria as an illustrative case study.