I thought I was off the hook for a second, but I appreciate the question. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate the committee's interest in reaching the most marginalized, your commitment to reaching children with disabilities and also recognizing that children with disabilities in humanitarian settings are particularly marginalized. I greatly appreciate it. It's refreshing.
Often with children living in humanitarian settings, conflicts, etc., their learning needs are lower in the priority, as I mentioned. I think it's a great role for Canada to play, and I really appreciate the interest.
As a bit of a scary statistic, for 10-year olds living in low- and middle-income countries, 70% of those 10-year olds cannot read, and many have been in school for years. We have a global learning crisis, full stop. Disabled children are particularly marginalized, as we've recognized. We come back to all the points that have been made by all of the committee members here in the discussion about the importance of inclusive systems being better for all children, and more efficient and more effective.
Then we come to a fragile context or humanitarian context. There are the ones you mentioned: Ukraine, currently in Gaza, Afghanistan etc. Indeed, you'll see, basically, education paused or children dropping out of the system and never coming back. That is what we're seeing in Afghanistan now.
It is incredibly expensive to enable children to catch up and return back.... It's the same in Canada—the dropout program, etc. It's absolutely critical that we all do our best to continue to enable the child to learn despite the challenging situations they're in.
We saw that in COVID, as you mentioned, with school closures. Obviously, the longer the school was closed, the greater the impact it had on all children, but particularly on marginalized children around the world. The disparities increased dramatically during that very challenging global time, and that's the case now where the crises have hit. Many of the countries I've worked in were often in humanitarian settings. It's the marginalized children who are disproportionately affected by crises. Disparities increase significantly, making it very challenging to bridge those kids who are already facing barriers back into school to continue on their learning journey.
That's absolutely a key message on the children with disabilities.