Safe to Learn Regional Roundtable with Ghana, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan and Uganda
The challenge:
Global evidence shows that children exposed to physical, sexual, and emotional violence at school, online and on their way to and from school have poor outcomes that undermine educational investments. Violence negatively affects students’ education, health, development, and well-being, with long-lasting adverse consequences that can be carried from generation to generation. It also prevents many children, including girls and the most vulnerable children, from attending school and accessing equal educational opportunities.
As African countries struggle to recover from the unprecedented education crisis caused by the COVID19 pandemic, ensuring schools and all learning environments provide the safe and supportive space that children need is more crucial than ever.
The solution:
Effective policies are evidence-based and informed by practice on-the-ground. While there is ample school-based data on violence against children, data gaps remain, and available data are not always accessible to policymakers and practitioners who need it.
This Safe to Learn Regional Roundtable, the first in a series of three roundtables to be held in Sub Saharan Africa, will provide the opportunity for participants to explore how to move data into action. The roundtables will leverage and share countries’ lessons learnt to demonstrate what works and how to overcome challenges in generating and using evidence to effectively end violence against children in school. The roundtables will also provide an opportunity for peer-to-peer inspiration and connections creating an inter- country platform for the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and tools and for informed dialogue across countries.
The first roundtable in this series will bring together policy makers and practitioners from the five countries in Africa that have endorsed the Safe to Learn Call to Action – Ghana, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan, and Uganda. Facilitated by global South and North experts on data, evidence and safe schools, this event brings policy and practice together. Ministries such as Education and Social Affairs will join active practitioners from civil society and other partner organizations to collectively explore context-appropriate prevention and response to violence in and around schools in the five countries.
Organisers:
The event is co-convened by the Safe to Learn Secretariat/End Violence Partnership, the CSO Forum to End Violence against Children, The Global Partnership for Education, UNESCO and UNICEF and organised in collaboration with the End Violence Lab at the University of Edinburgh.
Learn more about the Safe to Learn Regional Roundtable series.