Speak up for out of school children

Introduced at the GAiN Conference in Jordan, the ADRA/InSchool initiative aims to collect 1 million signatures by June 2020. At the conference, Raquel Arrais, General Conference Women’s Ministries Associate Director, gave a powerful message about the need for education and what Women’s Ministries are doing to help women and girls go to school.
Every child. Everywhere. In school. is a global, Adventist-led movement to ensure that every child, everywhere, attends school and completes their education so they can fulfil their God-given potential. No child should ever be denied an education. Not because of where they live. Not because their government is failing to provide adequate and free education. Not because their family is poor. Not because of conflict or displacement. Not because of their gender, ethnicity, or disability. Every child, everywhere, has the right to attend school and get an education.
Unfortunately, 262 million children, adolescents, and youth are currently denied this right. There are 131 million girls worldwide out of school. Girls are 1.5 times more likely than boys to be excluded from primary school. That means that 15 million girls of primary school age will never have the opportunity to learn to read and write in primary school, compared to about 10 million boys.
Education changes lives. Without it, nothing changes. Disadvantage lingers. Poverty continues. When a child completes their education, a whole new world of opportunity opens up. When you educate a child, you don’t just change one life, but the life of their family, their community, and future generations. When every child receives an education, the whole of society benefits. For girls the benefits are especially profound – if all women completed secondary education, there would be 49% fewer child deaths, 64% fewer early marriages, and 59% fewer young pregnancies, and they would earn up to 45% more than a woman with no education.
Conflict, natural disasters, and other emergencies severely disrupt children’s education. Children in fragile, conflict-affected countries are more than twice as likely to be out of school than children in non-conflict affected countries. Refugee children are five times more likely to be out of school than non-refugee children.
Between 93 million and 150 million children are estimated to live with disabilities. Children with disabilities are one of the most marginalized and excluded groups of children, and are often ‘invisible’ due to high levels of stigma, poverty and vulnerability. Disability has a greater impact on access to education than gender, household economic status, or rural/urban divide.
You can sign the petition at https://inschool.adra.org/ and find out how you can take action and promote the initiative.
The petitions will be presented to world leaders, calling on them to take more action. The petition is just one part in a sustained global campaign, launched by ADRA and supported by the SDA Church, to see every child, everywhere in school by 2030.