Topic description and stories

Image taken by UNRWA in a temporary school in Gaza during 2025.

After more than two years of war, Palestinian children are hungry, denied education and 'like the living dead' – report

08 Jan 2026

A University of Cambridge-led analysis of how war has affected education and children’s lives in Gaza calls for an urgent increase in international...

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Surgical instrument table

Patients three times more likely to die after abdominal trauma surgery in the world’s least developed countries

16 Sep 2025

Mortality after emergency abdominal surgery is more than three times higher in the least developed countries compared to the most developed. Yet...

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Young girl in Nepal

Sustained, purposeful investment key to ‘leaving no girl behind’, either in education or beyond

19 Oct 2023

A UK-funded programme to support out-of-school girls in low-income countries has significantly enhanced their learning, confidence, opportunities and...

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Children in Idlib Governorate, Syria: one of the countries most seriously affected by the underfunding of pre-primary education

Richest nations drift further away from 10% aid goal for pre-primary education

17 May 2023

New research shows proportion of international education aid for early childhood learning fell to just 1.1% post-pandemic, far short of an agreed 10...

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Schoolchildren in Rwanda

Students in Rwanda confound pandemic predictions and head back to school

07 Oct 2022

New data from Rwanda, and some of the first published on how COVID-19 has impacted school attendance in the Global South, suggest that a widely-...

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Children leaving school in Ale, Ethiopia

Poorly conceived payment-on-results funding threatens to undermine education aid

30 Mar 2022

Analysis of a results-based-financing programme for education aid in Ethiopia finds that multiple aspects of the arrangement were unfit for purpose...

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Student graduating in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Poor children are being ‘failed by the system’ on road to higher education in lower-income countries

07 Apr 2021

A generation of talented but disadvantaged children are being denied access to higher education because academic success in lower- and middle-income...

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School in Kampala, Uganda

School closures may have wiped out a year of academic progress for pupils in Global South, study warns

09 Mar 2021

As much as a year’s worth of past academic progress made by disadvantaged children in the Global South may have been wiped out by school closures...

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‘Left behind’ adolescent women must be prioritised within sustainable development agenda - report

11 Feb 2021

The needs of millions of overlooked, ‘left behind’ adolescent women must become a more significant priority within international efforts to end...

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In Ethiopia, schools still lack basic means to contain COVID-19, as pupils return after months of interrupted learning

07 Dec 2020

Many schools in Ethiopia lack the hygiene facilities and infrastructure to control COVID-19 effectively, as they reopen for the first time after...

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Students in class in Burkina Faso

School segregation by wealth is creating unequal learning outcomes for children in the Global South

27 May 2020

Millions of the world’s poorest children are leaving school without mastering even basic levels of reading or maths because of an overlooked pattern...

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Surging numbers of first-generation learners at risk of being left behind in education systems worldwide

21 May 2020

‘First-generation learners’ – a substantial number of pupils around the world who represent the first generation in their families to receive an...

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