Last week in Bogota, the 1st Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence against Children took place. Governments, civil society organizations, children, youth and survivors’ organizations, and United Nations and multilateral agencies committed to taking action to end all forms of violence against children.
Thanks to powerful efforts by GPE partners, including the Safe to Learn coalition, education and safe learning environments took center stage in the discussions.
Here are 3 takeaways from the event:
1. Governments are committed to keeping children safe in and through education.
Governments and organizations submitted over 120 pledges promising transformative action to end violence against children, and 44 governments made significant pledges to deliver safe and enabling learning environments by 2030 - the majority are from GPE partner countries.
From our work with partner countries, we know that they’re increasingly identifying violence, particularly gender-based violence, as a main barrier to achieving their priority education reforms. Over 50% of partnership compacts have included addressing violence as a significant issue.
More financing is needed. Evidence on the impact of violence on learning outcomes and the likelihood of children dropping out of school makes a convincing case for countries to ensure measures preventing violence in and around school are included in education budgets. This approach is both a more equitable and efficient way to deliver education resources and keep children learning.
2. Education helps break the cycle of violence.
In Colombia, I joined discussions on safe and enabling learning environments organized by GPE partners including Safe to Learn, UNESCO, UNICEF, the Coalition for Good Schools, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Office of the UN Special Representative for ending violence again children.
I shared GPE’s support to this issue and heard from partners about why addressing physical and sexual violence in and around education is crucial to their work to transform education systems. Education can play a key role to “break the cycle” of violence by addressing harmful gender norms through curricula, teacher and headteacher training, and providing safe spaces.
Drawing on the expertise of Safe to Learn, GPE is providing support to a technical assistance initiative on safe learning that is a new approach for building country capacity to plan and implement reforms that make girls and boys safer. This pilot will invest $3 million over the next 2 years to reinforce national capacity to address school violence in Sierra Leone, Nepal and an additional two to three countries.
3. We must work in partnership to tackle violence in and through education.
GPE’s gender-transformative systems approach has shown us that we cannot do this alone. We need to engage teachers, families and communities as well as wider social welfare and justice arms of governments. This cross-sectoral approach is crucial to bringing about change at a country level. And this change works best with political will and government leadership.
Since the beginning of the year, we’ve worked with the Safe to Learn coalition, UNICEF, FCDO, the Center for Global Development, UNESCO, the Coalition for Good Schools and others to profile GPE partner countries’ leadership on this issue. A series of events brought us to this moment, including a Wilton Park dialogue, the Education World Forum and a thematic session on violence in schools at our Board meeting in June.
Engaging at the ministerial conference in Bogotá was the culmination of efforts by many partners on this key issue and we look forward to supporting governments to implement their commitments. The education sector has made huge shifts in how we address the issue of violence in and through education.
As summarized by Joanna Herat, Chief of Health and Education at UNESCO, we have moved “from treating ending violence separately to [it] being a fundamental part of education systems.”