Good afternoon, I'm Taryn Russell, head of policy and advocacy at Save the Children Canada, and I'm here with my colleague, Tineka Levy, who's the humanitarian adviser.
Save the Children works to address the needs and rights of children in more than 100 countries around the world, including in Canada. We thank you for inviting us back today to discuss the impact of the pandemic on children.
As my colleague from UNICEF outlined, we wanted to coordinate our approach today in order to give you a holistic view on how this pandemic has created a global children's rights crisis, and what's needed to respond. I will be speaking to two intersecting and urgent issues: the global disruptions in education and the rise of gender-based violence.
Over a billion children's education came to a standstill in the early months of 2020, and most were out of school for six months or more. Around 200 million children who were in school before the pandemic remain out of school, and that number continues to fluctuate, as we know well here in Canada. When children are out of school, their learning does not just stop, but is likely to regress. Save the Children did a global survey of 25,000 children and their caregivers and found that four out of five children felt that they were learning little or nothing at all while out of school. Girls, displaced children and children living in poor households were most likely to report that they had learned nothing during school closures.
To give you a sense of some of the challenges to keep children learning in many contexts, here's a quote from Ghinwa, a 12-year-old Syrian girl living in a refugee camp in Lebanon:
Online education is extremely difficult, and the teachers aren’t explaining the lessons well. Since most parents are illiterate, they can’t help their children in understanding the lessons. Because of the financial situation, families can’t buy stationary or books or devices and some families have only one phone so the siblings need to share it and sometimes the father needs to take it with him to work so the children miss their classes.