Urgent Action Needed For Ethiopia's School Children

At the conclusion of a joint high-level mission in Ethiopia, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Global Champion and Danish Minister of Finance Nicolai Wammen, together with ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif, called for bold donor action to step up new and innovative financing solutions to deliver quality education for millions of children caught in crises in Ethiopia and beyond.

An estimated 9 million children are out-of-school across Ethiopia today due to ongoing violence, climate-induced disasters and widespread forced displacement – a staggering threefold increase from 2022.

Close to 18 percent of schools in the country have been destroyed or damaged. Ethiopia also hosts the third largest refugee population in Africa, with over 200,000 new arrivals from Sudan and Somalia in 2023-2024 alone, further increasing pressure on existing resources.

ECW’s high-level delegation travelled to the Tigray region, which is recovering from a 3-year conflict that brought education to a complete halt.

The delegation visited schools benefiting from funding by ECW and strategic partners, and met children, parents and teachers.

The delegation saw first-hand the impact of ECW-supported programmes implemented by UN and international and local civil society partners – including UNICEF, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children and Imagine1Day – in close collaboration with the government.

In one school alone, enrollment increased by an impressive 20 percent last year thanks to a comprehensive package of interventions funded by ECW.

During the mission, Sherif announced a new US$5 million First Emergency Response (FER) grant, bringing ECW’s total investments in Ethiopia to over US$93 million since 2017.

The new FER grant, implemented by UNICEF (US$4 million) and the local organization Imagine1Day (US$1 million) together with their consortium partners, aims to address urgent needs in the Oromia and Afar regions, where renewed conflict, intercommunal violence, drought and displacement have further disrupted education services in recent months.

These emergency interventions will build on the US$24 million Multi-Year Resilience Programme announced last month by ECW, targeting needs in the Amhara, Somali and Tigray regions.

To date, ECW’s combined multi-year and emergency investments in Ethiopia have reached more than 550,000 children and adolescents, providing a comprehensive range of supports – school rehabilitation, teacher training, mental health and psychosocial support, inclusive education, school feeding, gender transformative initiatives, early childhood education and more.

ECW’s support focuses on the most vulnerable, including girls, children from refugee, displaced and host community communities, and children with disabilities.

ECW’s investments are aligned to the Ethiopia Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) and the Ethiopia Education Sector Development Programme VI.

ECW urgently calls for additional resources to fill the US$64 million funding gap for the acute education needs of the 2024 HRP.