While there is optimism in our country thanks to high vaccination coverage and many students can once again go to school without a mouth mask, the global situation is anything but rosy at the moment. In quite a few of our partner countries, schools are not yet opening at all, and new lockdown measures are even being announced to combat the increased spread of the virus.
State of play
This includes Sri Lanka, where because of a new spike in delta variant infections, schools and educational centres were once again locked down. Also in Georgia, where we planned to start up a new mobile school in September, infection rates are far too high to work on the streets. Although our mobile school is already safely on site, in the interest of the safety of our staff and that of our partner, we had to take the difficult decision to postpone the start-up again. However, we do have another prospecting visit on the agenda in Kenya, to see if we can start a new partnership in the town of Eldoret in the near future.
The numbers
What is clear is that the coronavirus is still having a negative impact on the education situation in many countries. Even before the pandemic outbreak, education figures did not look positive. According to United Nations data, 200 million children could still be out of school by 2030 when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) expire. The fact that 188 countries were forced to close schools during the pandemic no doubt has an additional negative impact on progress. Projections suggest that another 10 million children risk never being able to attend school again as a result of the pandemic. Moreover, the measures hit the most vulnerable children the hardest. For example, it appears that globally 31% of pupils cannot be reached with distance learning via television or the internet because they simply do not have the capabilities or support to gain solid access to new ways of teaching.
Increased needs
Exact figures on the impact of the pandemic on education are not available at this time. Moreover, we do not know what plot twists will follow. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that years of progress are at stake, and everyone will have to pull out all the stops to ensure that children - anywhere in the world - can enforce their right to a quality education at all times. That is why we too anticipate the increased needs on the streets, and are strongly committed to start supporting more youth workers with our off- and online products in this uncertain period.
Entire education systems will have to respond resiliently to this crisis, but of course, the most important task falls to the teachers and tutors, those who, day in and day out, work with unbridled enthusiasm to develop their talents.
Therefore, we wish all teachers a wonderfully inspiring, and above all, healthy school year!
The MobileSchool.org team
