PRIO has received funding for an innovative new project titled Conflict-related attacks on education and children’s lost life opportunities. The multi-year ‘EdAttack’ project is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
During war and conflict, a grave violation that specifically harms children is attacks on education, whereby schools, students and teachers are attacked by armed actors. These attacks vary along multiple dimensions, such as who is targeted, the kind of attacks and their purpose.
Despite increasing attention among policymakers and researchers, a lack of systematic evidence exists regarding the impact of armed conflict on children’s life opportunities.
The EdAttack project aims to identify patterns of conflict-related attacks on education at the local level and analyse their consequences for individual children’s lost life opportunities in affected areas. The project will use state-of-the-art methods from data science and machine learning to construct a new, georeferenced dataset on attacks on education across sub-Saharan Africa. It will study the consequences of exposure to these attacks with regard to educational loss, child labour and child marriage – three inter-linked factors that reduce children’s life opportunities.
“Examining the extent to which the consequences of attacks on education ripple through communities, and how they impact the lives of children and youth will advance our understanding of conflict dynamics. It will yield important insights relevant to implementing Sustainable Development Goal #4 (inclusive and equitable education for all). If successful, the data collection procedure can be scaled up geographically over time, as well as topically to include a broader set of conflict violations,” said Research Professor, Gudrun Østby, who will lead the project.
“The project will analyse the extent to which national policies and international interventions aimed at safeguarding and/or re-establishing educational services could be key factors in both preventing attacks on education and mitigating their adverse effects,” said Østby.
