Reports

The 61-page report, “‘I Want to Continue to Study’: Barriers to Secondary Education for Syrian Refugee Children in Jordan,” documents increasingly difficult obstacles to education the further Syrian refugee children progress in school, with enrollment rates collapsing from nearly 90 percent in primary classes to just 25 to 30 percent in secondary school, according to governmental and United Nations data. With UN support, Jordan has created humanitarian education plans for Syrian refugees that aim to increase enrollment overall, but without specific secondary-school enrollment goals. Few foreign donors support secondary education. Informal education programs hosted by nongovernmental groups only reach a tiny fraction of children, Human Rights Watch found.

The 102-page report, “‘Their War Against Education’: Armed Group Attacks on Teachers, Students, and Schools in Burkina Faso,” documents scores of education-related attacks by armed Islamist groups in 6 of the country’s 13 regions between 2017 and 2020. The groups have killed, beaten, abducted, and threatened education professionals; intimidated students; terrorized parents into keeping children out of school; and damaged, destroyed, and looted schools.

The 91-page report, “China’s ‘Bilingual Education’ Policy in Tibet: Tibetan-Medium Schooling Under Threat,” examines the Chinese government’s rollback of minority education rights in Tibet under the guise of improving access to education. It highlights compulsory “bilingual” kindergartens that immerse Tibetan children in Chinese language and state propaganda from age 3, in the name of “strengthening the unity of nationalities.” These developments reflect an assimilationist policy for minorities that has gained momentum under President Xi Jinping’s leadership.

This report analyzes the Senegalese government’s policy, programming, and judicial efforts from 2017 to 2019 to address abuses against talibé children living in traditional Quranic boarding schools. It sets out a roadmap to end forced begging and abusive conditions in the Quranic schools, known as daaras.

This report documents how Bangladesh prohibits aid groups in the refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar district from providing Rohingya children with accredited or formal education. There is no secondary-level education, and groups are barred from teaching the Bengali language and using the Bangladesh curriculum. Rohingya children have no opportunity to enroll in or continue their education at private or public schools outside the refugee camps.

This report documents discrimination and barriers to education in the country’s public school system for most children with disabilities. A major obstacle is a mandatory government medical test that can exclude them from education altogether, the groups found. Additional barriers include inaccessible school buildings, discriminatory attitudes of school staff, and lack of adequate training for teachers and school administrators in inclusive education methods.

Nearly 10 years after Human Rights Watch’s first report documenting abuses against talibé children in Senegal, the scale of ongoing abuse remains staggering. Over 100,000 talibé children living in traditional Quranic schools are forced to beg daily by their teachers. This report documents scores of serious abuses committed against talibé children in 2017 and 2018 by Quranic teachers or their assistants, including forced begging, beatings, sexual abuse, chaining, imprisonment, and the deaths of 16 talibé children due to abuse, neglect or endangerment. The report also documents human trafficking and dangers linked to talibé migration. 

This report contains examples of law and practice from 50 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, that provide some level of protection for schools or universities from military use. Many of the examples come from countries currently or recently involved in armed conflict. 

This report finds that children suffer from corporal punishment at school because of a lack of accountability for the abusers. Human Rights Watch said that Lebanon should enforce a longstanding ban on corporal punishment and propose ways in which the Education Ministry, with support from international donors, can end the abuse. 

This report concludes that many girls simply have no access to education, including because of a shortage of government schools – especially for girls. Nearly 22.5 million of Pakistan’s children – in a country with a population of just over 200 million – are out of school, the majority of them girls. Thirty-two percent of primary school age girls are out of school in Pakistan, compared with 21 percent of boys. By ninth grade, only 13 percent of girls are still in school.

This report documents abuses against female students in secondary schools, primarily by teachers and school officials. Human Rights Watch found cases of teachers who abuse their authority by engaging in sexual relations with students in exchange for money, good grades, food, or items such as mobile phones and new clothes. 

This report found that fewer than 15 percent of more than 3,000 school-age asylum-seeking children on the islands were enrolled in public school at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, and that in government-run camps on the islands, only about 100 children, all preschoolers, had access to formal education. The asylum-seeking children on the islands are denied the educational opportunities they would have on the mainland. Most of those who were able to go to school had been allowed to leave the government-run camps for housing run by local authorities and volunteers.

This report draws on extensive Human Rights Watch research on the rights of girls in Africa. Human Rights Watch examined national laws, policies, and practices that block or support pregnant girls’ and adolescent mothers’ right to primary and secondary education in all African Union (AU) member countries. Africa has one of the highest rates of adolescent pregnancy in the world. African governments should urgently adopt laws and policies to ensure that schools allow and support pregnant girls to stay in school and to return to school after having a child.

This report describes how, as security in the country worsens and international donors disengage from Afghanistan, progress made toward getting girls into school has stalled. It is based on 249 interviews in Kabul, Kandahar, Balkh, and Nangarhar provinces, mostly with girls ages 11 to 18 who were not able to complete their education.

This report tracks pledges made at a conference in London in February 2016. Human Rights Watch followed the money trail from the largest donors to education in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, the three countries with the largest number of Syrian refugees, but found large discrepancies between the funds that the various parties said were given and the reported amounts that reached their intended targets in 2016. The lack of timely, transparent funding contributed to the fact that more than 530,000 Syrian schoolchildren in those three countries were still out of school at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.