This brief was submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights prior to the 7th Review of the United Kingdom, responding to the pre-sessional Working Group submission. It was submitted in January 2023 and focuses on UK international development cooperation in the area of education. Another report was submitted in 2024 with updates and recommendations.
This report was submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for the 7th review of the UK. It is an update of a first report submitted in 2023. It covers:
The major concerns raised by the International Development Committee of the UK Parliament about the UK’s investments as part of Overseas Development Aid (ODA)
The UK’s non-response following findings from investigations by the International Finance Corporation (IFC)’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO)
The absence of UK’s responses to the CESCR’s questions related to UK international development cooperation in the area of education
Update on the UK’s investments in fee-charging private education
Key recommendations
Our 2022 Annual Report includes information about our impact and areas of activity across the year, in addition to details on our strategy, our team and our supporters.
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This guide is part of a series of thematic guidance notes providing practical advice on monitoring various aspects of the right to education from a human rights perspective. These guides are based on, and supplement, the Right to Education Initiative’s (RTE) monitoring guide, which provides a human rights framework for monitoring education and education-related issues, as well as our experiences across various monitoring initiatives that we have undertaken with partners from all over the world.
This guide focuses on early childhood care and education (ECCE) and aims to provide human rights indicators and guidance for those advocating to ensure young children’s right to ECCE are guaranteed, respected and implemented. This guide is designed to explain and simplify the ECCE monitoring process. It includes a set of human rights indicators based on the international human rights law framework which will assist in gathering data, and in the subsequent generation of evidence on the violation of the rights of young children to have free and quality access to ECCE. This guide also encourages a democratic and participatory ECCE monitoring process.
This report aims to examine the barriers to education as a result of climate change and climate displacement, taking into account the policy implications of heightened human mobility. The comparative analysis contained is based on research undertaken in four regions around the globe (Central America and the Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, South-Eastern Europe and East Africa). The key conclusion of the analysis is that climate change poses direct and indirect threats to the fulfillment of SDG 4 and the right to education in all four regions studied.
Source: UNESCO
This paper lays out four concrete ways in which governments can protect education systems from climate change so that their positive impacts on economic development, poverty alleviation, and social cohesion can be sustained and boosted. These are: (i) education management for resilience; (ii) school infrastructure for resilience; (iii) ensuring learning continuity in the face of climate shocks; and (iv) leveraging students and teachers as change agents. The paper presents an actionable agenda for each of these with operational examples in different contexts.
What are the impacts of climate crisis and climate displacement on education?
What can countries do to improve the preparedness and resilience to protect the right to education ?
Watch this Side Event at the 79th Commission Session of UN ESCAP jointly organized by UNESCO Bangkok and UN University - Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability at United Nations ESCAP on 17 May 2023.
In this general comment, the Committee on the Rights of the Child emphasizes the urgent need to address the adverse effects of environmental degradation, with a special focus on climate change, on the enjoyment of children’s rights, and clarifies the obligations of States to address environmental harm and climate change. The Committee also explains how children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to environmental protection, and confirms that children have a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
In 2018, 17.2 million people were internally displaced as a result of natural disasters (IDMC 2019). Just one year later, in 2019, 24.9 million people were displaced due to natural disasters and extreme weather events (IDMC 2020). The catastrophic effects of climate change are no longer isolated emergencies, but have become the new global norm- a reality that is only intensifying each year. Yet the literature regarding climate change has little to no information on the specific nexus between climate displaced and their right to education.
Persons displaced by the effects of climate change face significant vulnerabilities with regard to accessing education: saturated school capacity, destroyed infrastructure, linguistic barriers, difficulties to have past qualifications recognized, discrimination, and more. This is why UNESCO commenced a new initiative: the Impact of Climate Displacement on the Right to Education. This is explored throughout this working paper.
This document provides an overview of the provisions of the international human rights framework linking the right to education with issues related to the environment and climate change.