ReliefWeb

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Schools and universities should be safe places of learning. However, children’s and young people’s rights to education and protection are violated in most countries experiencing conflict or insecurity. Students and education personnel have been threatened, killed, injured, tortured, recruited, and used by armed forces and armed groups, while in school or en route to and from school. Armed parties have also used schools and universities as barracks and bases, for weapons storage, as detention centers, and for other military purposes—jeopardizing the safety of students and staff. The short-term impacts of attacks on education include death, injury, and destruction of educational infrastructure. The long-term impacts include disruptions in attendance, declines in student enrolment, diminished quality of education and learning, and reductions in teacher recruitment—all of which can prevent countries from fulfilling the right to education and other rights, as well as achieving education and development goals.

This paper is primarily intended for Ministries of Education, UN agencies, and international and local non-governmental organizations (I/NGOs) to support school-based actors, namely principals, teachers, school management committees, and community members to develop and strengthen approaches to planning and protecting education from attack and schools from military use at the school-level.

The aim of this paper is to describe what is actually being done in the field at the school-level to protect education from attack, identifying the risks and challenges involved, and drawing out lessons learned and recommendations from these measures as well as other literature on the topic. The measures have not been formally evaluated, so much of our understanding of what is successful and what is not is based on the anecdotal assessment of practitioners and is context-specific.

Seven school-based measures are described and each measure includes country examples and case studies, considerations regarding risks and challenges, as well as other lessons learned. Education actors considering implementing the school-based protection measures described in this paper should review all of the measures to assess the applicability to their own context, the risks involved, and the potential benefits. Since risks and conflict contexts vary from country to country, there is no one approach that can be applied to all situations. Measures must be adapted to meet the context-specific needs of each country or locale, and a conflict-sensitive approach to development and implementation adopted to ensure that measures “do no harm.”