The Sustainable Development Goals, which the international community adopted in September, include a commitment to provide every child with access to free primary and secondary education by 2030.Finding the additional $20 billion per year, or more, that will needed to deliver on

No visitor to the Middle East can avoid noticing the yawning gap between the educational, entrepreneurial and occupational aspirations of the region’s young people and the harsh reality that deprives so many of them of a positive future.Indeed, in the Middle East, half of those a

Just days ago, Abdul Al Kader, his four-year-old daughter Abdelillah, draped over his shoulders, was photographed standing at a dangerous intersection in Beirut, trying to sell biro pens to feed his family.The image of this Syrian refugee family’s plight, tweeted by a Norwegian,

On a recent visit to Beirut, I met a girl and a boy who struggled through a year filled with dread.

This year is a critical one for education worldwide. Despite a commitment by the international community to guarantee universal primary schooling, some 58 million of the world’s most marginalised children remain out of the classroom. And as we seek to expand the internati

A disaster happens. Bilateral aid is promised.

It has been nearly a year since the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their school in the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria, on April 14, 2014. Last week, on the website for the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, I publis

Why is it that schools and schoolchildren have become such high-profile targets for murderous Islamist militants? The 147 students killed in an attack by the extremist group Al Shabab at a college close to Kenya’s border with Somalia are only the latest victims in a succes

Europe is once again divided between East and West — only this time the fault line runs through the European Union. The eastern members — most notably Poland and the Baltic states — are clinging fast to the EU in the face of Russian aggression. At the other ge