More than 9,000 students, teachers, and academics were harmed, injured, or killed in attacks on education during armed conflict over the past two years, according to Education under Attack 2022, a 265-page report published today by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA).
More than 5,000 separate attacks on education facilities, students, and educators, or incidents of military use, took place in 2020 and 2021, a significant increase over the previous two years.
Researchers found that the number of attacks on education and military use of schools increased from 2019 to 2020 by one-third, and continued at this heightened rate in 2021, even as schools and universities around the world closed for prolonged periods during the Covid-19 pandemic.
GCPEA found attacks on the rise in countries including Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ethiopia, Mali, Myanmar, and Nigeria, and emergent in others such as Mozambique and Azerbaijan, while downward trends were identified in South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Attacks intensified in 2022: Over a thousand schools and universities have been damaged in Ukraine since February 24, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science and Civil Society groups.
“It is crucial for governments and armed groups to end attacks on education, and stop using schools and universities for military purposes,” said Diya Nijhowne, GCPEA executive director. “Governments should investigate attacks and prosecute those responsible for abuses. In post-Covid-19 ‘back to school’ campaigns, they need to fully integrate students affected by attacks, expanding alternative education programs developed during the pandemic as necessary.”
Attacks on education involve armed forces and non-state armed groups bombing and burning schools and universities, and killing, injuring, raping, abducting, arbitrarily arresting, and recruiting students and educators at or near educational institutions, during armed conflict. In addition to the deaths and injuries caused by these attacks, destroyed and occupied schools upend learning, sometimes permanently, and have long-term social and economic consequences.
Explosive weapons, which were involved in one-fifth of all reported attacks on education, had particularly devastating effects, killing or injuring countless students and educators and damaging hundreds of schools and universities. In Afghanistan, attacks on schools involving explosive weapons killed or injured at least 185 students and educators, nearly all of them girls, in the first half of 2021 alone.
