Giving Compass' Take:
- Millions of Pakistani children have missed school, and the major flooding in Pakistan will continue to disrupt educational patterns.
- What are the ways that donors can help address the flooding while centering children's needs?
- Read more about the impact of Pakistan floods.
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When flooding devastated northwest Pakistan in late August, 8-year-old Sinain Bibi lost out on about two months of education after half of her school building was swept away, along with the wooden bridge that connected her village with the school.
Bibi must now embark on a treacherous trek each day to attend a makeshift school, held in a tent on a riverbank in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. She is worried about the class time she has missed and said it would take her a while to catch up.
“The calamity has seriously disturbed my studies as I couldn’t learn a single lesson since my school was closed,” Bibi said outside the temporary school in the village of Lagan Khar village, in Swat district.
“I’ve even forgotten those lessons which I had learned before my school was shut down,” she said.
The catastrophic deluge - brought on by record monsoon rains and melting glaciers, both exacerbated by climate change, scientists say - killed more than 1,700 people and has caused over $30 billion in damage.
Pakistan is now facing not only humanitarian and health emergencies - with 33 million people, about a seventh of the population, impacted by flooding - but also an education crisis, communities and officials warn.
The UN children’s agency (UNICEF) said last month that the flooding has damaged or destroyed more than 26,600 schools nationwide, while at least 7,060 others are being used as temporary relief camps and shelters for the displaced.
More than 3.5 million children have had their education disrupted, UNICEF said, in a country that even before the floods had the world’s second highest number of out-of-school children - 22.8 million of those aged 5-16, or 44 per cent of that age group.
“Having already endured some of the world’s longest school closures due to the (Covid-19) pandemic, (Pakistan’s children) are experiencing yet another threat to their future,” UNICEF’s global education director, Robert Jenkins, said in a statement.
Read the full article about children missing school in Pakistan due to flooding from Thomas Reuters Foundation at Eco-Business.