Six Months After Cyclone Nargis Disaster, New Report Highlights Critical Role of Education in Helping Children Recover  

YANGON, Myanmar (Oct. 31, 2008) — Six months after the devastating Myanmar cyclone, Save the Children has shown that quality education can and should be provided in the aftermath of an emergency.

The cyclone destroyed more than half of all schools in the nation’s delta region, yet over the past six months Save the Children has improved the quality of education for more than 100,000 children affected by the storm, including helping build over 350 temporary schools.

“It’s hard to overstate how important getting children back to school is,” said Andrew Kirkwood, Save the Children’s country director in Myanmar. “The best way to deal with emotional distress is to normalise the lives of children, get them back into a routine, and enable them to pick up what they were doing before the cyclone.”

Save the Children’s experience in many emergencies demonstrates that education in emergencies can be provided and is of value, not only to children but also to whole communities.

Common Interventions That Work Across Different Emergency Contexts

Save the Children’s new report, "Delivering Education for Children in Emergencies: A Key Building Block for the Future," emphasizes that, while every emergency is unique, a number of interventions are common across contexts and can be tailored to specific cases.

“There’s a huge demand for this, from communities and children. There were about 400,000 children who were not able to go to school because of the cyclone. Now, we’ve managed to get 100,000 of those kids back into school through, for example, the rebuilding of temporary schools, using relatively inexpensive materials,” said Kirkwood.

New Report, "Delivering Education for Children in Emergencies: A Key Building Block for the Future," International Save the Children Alliance, October, 2008.

Save the Children has shown time and again that education can and should be provided, even in the immediate aftermath of an emergency. In December 2007, Save the Children reacted quickly to Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, which affected over 260,000 students. Within a month almost all students were able to return to school. Save the Children was able to help over 37,000 children continue their education despite very difficult circumstances.

Yet, education is still not part of every humanitarian response and, as a result, children affected by conflict or natural disasters miss out on weeks, months or even years of schooling.

Save the Children’s new report sets out why education is a critical part of humanitarian response and demonstrates that it is possible to provide quality education even in the midst of conflict.

Even though education saves lives, in both the short and the long term, quality education in emergencies is still viewed as secondary when compared to the provision of food, water, medical assistance and shelter. Less than 2 percent of humanitarian emergency aid went to education in 2007.

Moreover, when governments do fund education as part of their emergency response, they tend to do so as a series of short-term projects rather than as part of a longer-term continuum from emergency to development.

On average, 750,000 children have their education disrupted or miss out entirely on education owing to humanitarian disasters each year. In addition, there are 72 million children out of school worldwide and more than half of them — 37 million— live in countries affected by conflict.

Read "Delivering Education for Children in Emergencies" and other publications at: http://www.savethechildren.org/campaigns/rewrite-the-future/resources.html

Read more about our response to the cyclone in Myanmar.

Donate now to support Save the Children’s immediate and long-term response to the children and families affected by the cyclone in Myanmar.

Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org) is the leading, independent organization that creates lasting change for children in need in the United States and around the world. Save the Children USA is a member of the International Save the Children Alliance, a global network of 28 independent Save the Children organizations working to ensure the well-being and protection of children in more than 100 countries.