EdAttack is a comprehensive and ambitious project that aspires to remedy the current shortcomings of data on conflict-related attacks on education (AoE) and map its short-term and long-term consequences. There is a need for systematic empirical investigations of AoE's key consequences like educational loss, child labor, and child marriage. EdAttack also seeks to study how AoE impacts children’s life opportunities in the future or away from the attack site. Lastly, the project identifies the need to better understand how national policies focused on protecting education and international interventions, such as peacekeeping and aid, might mitigate the effects of AoE.
Few, if any studies have examined this, nor the dynamics and tensions across actors at the international, national, and local levels. Our overall objective is to systematically 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 utilize state-of-the-art methods from data science and machine learning to construct a new, georeferenced dataset on AoE events across sub-Saharan Africa.
This project is led by Gudrun Østby and funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
