When education comes under deliberate or indiscriminate attack during armed conflicts; is impacted by climate hazards; or is forcibly closed during public health emergencies, the consequences are severe and generational. As of 2025, more than 85 million children in these crisis contexts are out of school worldwide – deprived of their right to education and without the sufficient support from the international community.
Historically, of all global humanitarian funding, aid to education has accounted for a mere 3%. And yet, at a time where needs are climbing, international donors are stepping away from supporting education in crisis contexts. Widespread international aid cuts have forced humanitarian actors to reduce their funding requests for education by more than 33%. In September, UNICEF reported that international aid to education is projected to fall by more than $3.2 billion by 2026, with the governments of the United States, Germany, and France accounting for more than 80% of the shortfall.
As many traditional donors pull back, the humanitarian system will be increasingly strained to do more with less, risking further neglect for support to education. Ensuring access to safe and quality education is a life-saving intervention, not only in its own right but also in the way that it facilitates access to food, health, and safety services. Without an urgent course correction, many more millions of crisis-affected children will be deprived of their right to education and conflicts will risk metastasizing across generations.
Education as a Frontline Crisis Response
The outbreak of an acute crisis (typically understood as an armed conflict, climate disaster, or public health emergency) triggers an influx of humanitarian funding as U.N. agencies and international nongovernmental organizations rush to conduct needs assessments, mobilize resources, and coordinate emergency responses to reach affected populations – sometimes in conjunction with host governments and sometimes despite them.
At surface level, the low share of education aid within global humanitarian funding is perhaps understandable. Humanitarian actors may prefer to invest in what are commonly perceived as more “immediate and life-saving” programs such as those addressing food insecurity, ensuring access to safe drinking water, and providing health and hygiene programs. Interrupted or jeopardized education is often perceived as a less-life-threatening, temporary issue that can be resolved through longer-term development programming once a crisis stabilizes. For some, there also remain concerns regarding how education can be meaningfully supported without violating the guiding humanitarian principle of neutrality.
Upon further analysis, however, this paradigm has several inherent shortcomings. First, education is lifesaving. Schools and universities not only serve as protective spaces during the acute phases of crisis and conflict but also represent the entry point for other humanitarian interventions. While at school, children have centralized access to meals, medical care, and psychosocial support. In addition to facilitating these interventions, a continued education provides children with a sense of normality and community critical to coping with the surrounding uncertainty.
Second, schools and universities in crisis contexts offer a key conduit for disseminating communal safety guidance. In Ukraine, where an estimated 20% of the country’s land is contaminated by landmines, UNICEF has been conducting mine recognition and safety programming in schools. In Mali, climate-friendly schools built with funding from Education Cannot Wait (a global fund for education in crisis contexts) provide trainings to students and community members on climate adaptation survival strategies.
Education is thus lifesaving not only in the immediate aftermath of a crisis but also in the indirect, longer term as communities recover and rebuild.
Third it is also increasingly apparent that education cannot wait until after a crisis wanes. Whether an armed conflict, climate shock, or pandemic, crises are increasingly expanding and enduring. More than 110 armed conflicts are currently raging around the world, and climate change is fueling greater – and deadlier – natural disasters and pandemics. In 2024, a World Bank report warned that “a 10-year-old in 2024 will experience three times more floods, five times more droughts, and 36 times more heatwaves over their lifetime compared to a 10-year-old in 1970.” Reflecting these realities, as of 2024, the average length of a humanitarian appeal stretched to 10 years.
Each day children are out of school brings greater risk of grave harms. One such example is child marriage – a global issue that affects 12 million girls every year. On average, every additional year of secondary education lowers a girl’s risk of child marriage by 6% while increasing her future earnings by as much as 20%. Yet in crisis contexts, girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school than boys and face additional socioeconomic barriers to returning.
Aside from child marriage, children who do not attend school are susceptible to forced recruitment into armed groups. Between 2005 and 2022, UNICEF found that at least 105,000 children were recruited by armed groups and subjected to gross violence, exploitation, and in many cases long-lasting trauma. International law forbids the recruitment of children under the age of 18 and deems it a war crime when the victims are under 15.
Fourth, affected communities themselves have been quick to recognize the lifesaving role of education as a frontline response to crisis. A Save the Children survey of almost 1,400 children across eight countries affected by humanitarian emergencies found that education ranked as their highest concern, nearly double the next response: water.
Rising Global Needs
While 85 million crisis-affected children are out of school, another estimated 234 million are in need of urgent support to be able to access schooling. In the last three years, the number of at-risk children has increased by around 35 million.
The pressing need to support education for children in crisis contexts exists in dozens of contexts around the globe. In Gaza, Israeli forces have damaged or destroyed 97% of schools, as the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry has found the systemic destruction of education facilities a component of the charges of genocide. In northern Nigeria, armed groups continue to abduct hundreds of young women and girls from their classrooms.
Meanwhile, even before conflict erupted in Sudan in April 2023, the country had extensive educational needs, with around 6.9 million children out of school. Over the last few years, this number has ballooned to more than 13 million (more than 75% of school-aged children) as more than 55% of schools in the country remain closed. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict in the east has led to the destruction or closure of thousands of schools, resulting in more than 1.6 million out-of-school children.
In Myanmar, an earthquake in March 2025 damaged and destroyed more than 2,500 schools, exacerbating an already dire situation after the 2021 military coup. Aside from natural disasters, human rights groups in Myanmar have reported more than 170 attacks on schools in the country, primarily in the form of airstrikes at the hands of the military junta. This dual and deadly convergence of climate shocks and armed conflict has left more than 6.3 million children in need of humanitarian support, with about 4.5 million of them having little or no access to learning.
Policy Recommendations
As a principal global issue, securing, streamlining, and investing in children’s education in crisis contexts necessitates a global response. This response will inherently be multifaceted and multidisciplinary, stretching across humanitarian and development programming. For the sake of this analysis, however, several key policy recommendations emerge for humanitarian actors and donors:
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- For new and emerging donors: As some of the largest humanitarian donors abdicate the arena, new donors must fill the gap. The humanitarian system has long been dependent on the same group of Global North countries. In 2024, for example, the United States was responsible for funding around 47% of all global humanitarian appeals. In 2023, almost 75% of all humanitarian aid came from seven donors: the United States, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, and European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (the European Union’s humanitarian aid arm).New and emerging donors in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and South America must ramp up their funding for humanitarian aid, keeping support for education as one of the pillars of their interventions. As it is unlikely that public donors alone can fill the gap, private donors also have an indispensable role to play. The private sector has often accounted for around 20% of international humanitarian aid in any given year, which is a significant but yet insufficient contribution to meeting current needs.
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- For humanitarian practitioners: Ensure humanitarian interventions mainstream education by treating it as a lifesaving and indispensable service. Education should be integrated into core response plans – ensuring safe, accessible learning spaces (even temporary ones) for all children, especially those with disabilities. Programming must link education provision to other essential aid services including nutrition, water, health, and mental health and psychosocial support interventions. Whenever possible, practitioners should ensure their interventions align with national plans and use available data for better, context-sensitive delivery.
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- For all stakeholders: Rather than repurpose pre-existing modalities, the humanitarian community must honor the under-implemented 2016 Grand Bargain – a roadmap to make humanitarian aid more efficient and transparent – by directing higher levels of funding and coordination to local actors. In 2022, only 1.2% of humanitarian aid went directly to local or national actors. As these resources dwindle, it is essential that local and national organizations, which can often deliver more efficient programming in any case, receive more direct funding and greater consultation powers into sector reforms. Localizing aid is about more than efficiency and just as much about redistributing power. As community-led efforts ramp up to fill the gaps left by cuts to international aid to education, humanitarian donors and agencies must work in partnership with, rather than around, these actors.
While the world faces no shortage of issues and threats, ensuring that hundreds of millions of children in crisis contexts retain a lifeline to education must remain on top of the international agenda. Under current trends, the right to education is violated for too many children, hampering the ability of communities to rebuild for the future. Education is one of the world’s most powerful tools for societal development and prosperity, and it has perhaps never been under greater threat.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not an official policy or position of New Lines Institute.
