IPS : Many countries hosting refugee children and youth have benefitted from ECW’s programs – including Afghanistan, Uganda, Bangladesh and Chad. You also have programs in Colombia, for example, for Venezuelan refugees. These include several multi-year programs for refugees and displaced children. Has COVID-19 affected the fundraising for the projects? Is sufficient funding available, and if not, what needs to be done?

YS: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted funding for millions of people already reeling from conflict, record levels of displacement and climate change shocks. According to the United Nations, 235 million people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance and protection in 2021 alone – an increase of 40 percent in one year. Among those urgently in need of assistance are 128 million children and youth whose education is disrupted by humanitarian crises, up from 75 million before the pandemic struck.

For these children, COVID-19 is a crisis upon a crisis. Some 79.5 million are currently displaced, more people than at any time since World War II. Almost half – 34 million – of those displaced are children and youth, and 48 percent of all school-age refugee children are out of school. Most have been out of education for so long that they now lack the most basic competencies in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many, forced to flee their homes at a young age, have never stepped foot in a classroom.

This brings us back to the solution: financing. Despite encouraging progress in recent years, education for displaced children and youth remains severely underfunded, with only one-third of current funding needs being met according to UNESCO. So, improving education financing for refugees and the internally displaced requires bringing together both humanitarian and development aid in line with commitments made at the World Humanitarian Summit, in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and at the Refugee Global Compact.

The time is over when humanitarians did their part at one end of the spectrum and the development actors their part at the other end of the spectrum. The time is over when silos and competition over funding take over cooperation and coordination, and a more enlightened awareness of working together for others emerges to stay.

This is why Education Cannot Wait was established. To end the silos and competition, to bring together the humanitarian and development actors through the United Nations established coordination system, to work jointly, for collective outcomes, which, in the education sector, means learning outcomes. Education is a development sector, but financing cannot be confined to children and youth living in traditional development settings.