The Right to Education was first articulated by the UN in 1948, yet millions of children worldwide are still out of schools.
A UN report in 2022 put the number of children who need education support at 222mn, up from 75mn in 2016. This education deprivation is on the increase, mostly due to unrelenting armed conflicts compounded by climate crises, prompting governments and international organisations to show further efforts.
At the forefront of countries striving to subdue barriers to education globally is Qatar.
In September 2018, His Highness the Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani announced Qatar’s pledge to provide quality education to 1mn girls by 2021.
The announcement, during a round-table on the sidelines of the 73rd UN General Assembly, was part of Doha’s ground-breaking initiatives spearheaded by the Education Above All Foundation (EAA) for education and youth development.
The EAA, a brainchild of its founder and chairperson Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, envisions a world where all people have equal access to quality education. Since its inception in 2012, it has harnessed efforts to transform the lives of marginalised children and youth by providing quality, comprehensive and equitable education.
CEO of EAA, Fahad al-Sulaiti told Qatar News Agency (QNA) that the EAA provided top-notch education to more than 17.2mn children and youth across over 65 countries, in collaboration with 100 global partners concerned with humanitarian and development work.
Among the EAA’s most notable partners come the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), UN Children’s Fund (Unicef), UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
In collaboration with UN agencies, the EAA has reached over 8mn out-of-school children in more than 30 countries, with the QFFD contributing with 38% of over US$1bn joint investments in education for the most vulnerable children.
These partnerships have also contributed to enhancing innovative quality education and strengthening legal protection and human rights for children and youth in conflict.
The EAA and the UN agencies, added al-Sulaiti, have partnered across a wide range of projects including constructing schools, offering educational resources and rolling out scholarship programmes, with the aim of assisting millions of the hardest to reach children now out of school.
The EAA and the Unicef have been active in countries like Gambia, Paraguay, Somalia, Tanzania, Zanzibar, and others, where more than 5.3mn children are out of schools. The two sides are collaborating in the Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict (PEIC) Programme, part of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA). With PEIC’s involvement, GCPEA championed the Safe Schools Declaration in 2015, now endorsed by 118 states.
Also among the projects are the Al Fakhoora programme in Gaza to improve the educational environment and support the mental health of about 756,987 children, and the Reach Out to Asia programme which helped educate 263,888 children in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal.
Highlighting the EAA’s co-operation with the Unesco, al-Sulaiti said the Educate A Child programme had backed the Unesco initiatives such as the GEM 2019 report, in addition to another joint project that provided education for hundreds of thousands of children in the Asean countries.
He added that the PEIC rolled out TRACE, the Track Attacks on Education (TRACE) Data Portal, a tool applying humanitarian technology to generate reliable, timely data on attacks on education to be freely shared.
This comes at a time when the Al Fakhoora programme contributed to supporting the education system in Iraq by developing new curricula and training teachers benefitting 930,776 children.
The Educate A Child programme, another co-operation project between the EAA and the OHCHR, seeks to provide primary education to the most marginalised children in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, where more than 1.5mn children benefitted from the project.
The programme also collaborated with the OHCHR to launch of the Youth Advisory Board (YAB), a project striving to safeguard and promote the human rights of youth in conflict.
In addition, the EAA collaborated with the UNRWA through the Al Fakhoora programme to maintain 43 schools damaged during the conflict in Gaza, benefiting 567,600 children. The Al Fakhoora also co-operated with the UNDP on two projects as well, one of which was the Dynamic Futures Scholarship Programme.
This programme empowered 1,000 Palestinian youths through higher education, training and community activities.
The two sides also co-operated through the Right to Education programme to rebuild and restore 99 educational facilities devastated in the conflict in Gaza, while enhancing access to education for 70,000 children and youth, supporting mental health and economic opportunities, in addition to co-operating with UNRWA to return about 70,000 students to schools in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
In addition to these projects, the Foundation co-operated with the UNFPA through the Al Fakhoora programme to implement 250 youth-led humanitarian initiatives, targeting 18,000 women and youth, a project seeking to rebuild hope for Palestinians in the Gaza project.
