While data on attacks on education has become more widely available thanks to better awareness and efforts by national and international organizations and monitoring bodies, critical data gaps remain. Reporting systems may be absent, weak, or disconnected from effective responses to attacks on education. Monitors, as well as victims and witnesses, may face threats to their safety, or insecurity may prevent monitors from accessing areas where attacks occur. As such, many attacks and incidents of military use go unreported, undermining efforts to calculate their prevalence.
Even when reporting mechanisms exist, data is not often disaggregated by gender, age, location, type of attack, or perpetrator. Violations such as child recruitment and sexual violence by armed forces or armed groups at, or en route to, school often go underreported. The impacts of attacks on education and military use – such as school days lost, drop-outs, and school closures – remain difficult to calculate due to such gaps. And even when data collection occurs regularly, its analysis and reporting do not always occur at regular intervals.
The following pages comprise a comprehensive Toolkit for Collecting and Analyzing Data on Attacks on Education which addresses the abovementioned gaps in data collection; promotes inter-sectoral collaboration on data collection, analysis, and reporting; and strengthens and harmonizes definitions and concepts related to attacks on education.