Global Estimates: Number of Crisis-Affected Children and Adolescents in Need of Education Support

This new study proposes a new methodology that leverages the latest, most granular available data on crisis severity, children with functional difficulties, forcibly displaced children, out-of-school rates and data from learning outcomes from UNICEF MICS surveys, PISA-D and TIMSS databases to estimate of the number of out-of-school children in emergencies and the number of crisis-affected children who may not be learning, and hence need urgent educational support. We find that about 222 million school-aged children are affected by crises globally. This innovative methodology can provide consistent cross-country measurement of education outcomes for children in crises, relying on high levels of granularity and disaggregation, while allowing flexible integration of new research and new data as it becomes available in fast-moving crises. The estimates can be updated at a high frequency (as frequently as monthly) with crisis-specific data, and estimates can be adjusted accordingly to reflect the evolution of crises at subnational level.