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GANTA TOWN, Liberia, 16 September 2011 – War, bullets and bloodshed – words which generations of Liberians are still more familiar with than books or schools. It’s only been eight years since the country knew peace; the scars from its paralyzing 14-year civil war remain visible as its people try to heal. Today, the government is working to rebuild the infrastructure that was completely destroyed – large parts of Liberia doesn’t have roads and millions are living without basic access to water, healthcare or electricity. But ask any Liberian what they need most and the answer is the same – education

Despite recent economic development, Angola remains a society deeply scarred by the still-recent civil war. The conflict caused massive internal displacement and refugee outflows, along with the collapse or destruction of key agricultural, health, education and transportation infrastructures, limiting the government’s ability to provide basic public services. This has resulted in a series of barriers to children enrolling and remaining in school.

Children living in emergencies or post-conflict contexts are often excluded from schooling or start school late. Their educational progress suffers and they lack the necessary tools for learning, leading them to drop out of school.

Many of today’s adolescents in Angola were born during the prolonged civil war and missed several years of schooling or never had the opportunity to attend primary school at all. These youth often do not fit in the primary school setting, and classrooms are already crowded with much younger children.

Since the Second World War, while the number of conflicts between countries has declined, the number of civil wars has steadily increased – bringing more and more civilians into the firing line, and exposing schools, schoolchildren and teachers to deadly violence.

An increasing number of children are being killed and injured in the Afghan conflict,

Education is often deliberately targeted in such violence, according to evidence outlined last month by Human Rights Watch in Schools as Battlegrounds, an essay in the organisation’s World Report 2011.  “Intentional targeting of education is a far-reaching if underreported phenomenon,” Zama Coursen-Neff and Bede Sheppard write in the essay.

Our Mission is Planting seeds to harvest a peaceful tomorrow through promoting peaceful coexistence among Liberians by empowering youth, adults, and elders with the tools necessary to solve disputes/conflicts peacefully and nonviolently among themselves while addressing the trauma the Liberian Civil War has created.

Ikotos, South Sudan-a scenic region that belies its tragic past. For the past two decades the area has been ravaged by conflict, disease and deprivation. Basic services are scarce with education facilities suffering from a desperate lack of trained teachers and teaching resources.

Education is vital to the recovery of a region. Education will enable Ikotos' youth to escape a life of poverty and lead prosperous lives.

UNICEF has launched an initiative to get children back to school but there is a significant and unaddressed gap in teacher training. Education was near nonexistent during the civil war and has been slow to recover. Schooling mostly takes place in temporary shacks or under trees with limited or no teaching resources. Only 67 out of 353 primary school teachers in the Ikotos region received any training at all. Not only are most of the teachers untrained but some of have not completed even primary school education. Few have access to basic teaching materials. Without sufficiently trained teachers, increasing the rate of school attendance will be ineffective. With 11,809 pupils in Ikotos needing education, this is a desperate situation and a severe block to Ikotos's recovery.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan is taking to the airwaves with a new radio drama series aimed at raising public awareness on various issues, including measures related to the ongoing process of implementing the peace accord that ended two decades of civil war in Africa’s largest country.

Radio drama is considered an effective way of promoting debate on sensitive social and political issues in a compelling way, while also reaching populations with low literacy rates and who have limited access to information because they live in remote areas.

Imagine, for a moment, that you had to walk for miles to find clean water. Imagine again, if you lived in a country devastated by civil war and humanitarian disaster, and your only source of water was contaminated by the runoff from refugee camps—garbage, human excrement, and people bathing.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement today. “Water is the source of life and the link that binds all living beings on this planet,” he said. “It is connected directly to all our United Nations goals: improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women's empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.” There is good news: there have been vast improvements in water and sanitation—so much so that 87% of the world population can now access safe drinking water, and is on-target to meet the targets identified in the Millennium Development Goals. The majority of these improvements have been in rural areas.

90% of the 1.1 billion people forced to defecate in open areas due to a lack of toilets or latrines are rural dwellers. Conditions such as these are the primary cause of the 1.5 million deaths of children under five years old due to diarrhoeal diseases, the UN reports. Such needless deaths have been called “an affront to our common humanity” by Ban Ki-Moon. In addition to faecal contamination risks, poor personal hygiene, agricultural and livestock runoff, and inadequate garbage disposal services can spread water-borne diseases.

2. Education for peace

272. Governments, non-governmental organizations, women's groups and the mass media should encourage women to engage in efforts to promote education for peace in the family, neighbourhood and community. Special attention should be given to the contribution of women's grass-roots organizations. The multiple skills and talents of women artists, journalists, writers, educators and civic leaders can contribute to promoting ideas of peace if encouraged, facilitated and supported.

273. Special attention should be given to the education of children for life in peace within an atmosphere of understanding, dialogue and respect for others. In this respect, suitable concrete action should be taken to discourage the provision of children and young persons with games and publications and other media promoting the notion of favouring war, aggression, cruelty, excessive desire for power and other forms of violence, within the broad processes of the reparation of society for life in peace.

The government of Israel and UNESCO will sign an agreement to reinforce their cooperation in developing and promoting Holocaust education and combating denial of the mass murder of Jews and other groups in World War II.

Prior to the screening (2.30p.m), Irina Bokova and Israel’s Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, will sign an agreement to provide additional resources for UNESCO’s Holocaust education, remembrance and research activities. The agreement also concerns the development of Holocaust education curricula in various languages for primary and secondary schools.

UNESCO works to mobilise networks of professionals, academics, scientists and civil society, including UNESCO/UNITWIN university chairs and UNESCO’s Associated Schools, in favour of Holocaust remembrance. Special attention is given to teacher training activities. UNESCO’s partners in this area include the Yad Vashem centre for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust (Israel), and other relevant institutions.

MAKAMBA, 24 February 2011 (IRIN) - Unversed in Burundi's official languages of French and Kirundi, children of refugees returning after decades spent in Anglophone countries, such as neighbouring Tanzania, often find it difficult to continue their studies and some drop out.

To ensure such students continue learning, a group of returnee teachers has set up an education centre in the commune of Mabanda in Makamba Province, near Tanzania. The teachers work without pay. "We couldn't just sit back while our children faced a lack of education due to a language barrier," Norbert Bitaboneka, the principal, told IRIN. Swahili and English are the languages of instruction at the facility, the Centre Prévisionnel de l'Afrique de l'Est (East African Planning Centre), in line with the Tanzanian curriculum. The language of instruction in Burundian schools is French.

Most of the returnee students affected by the language barrier are those whose parents fled Burundi during civil war in 1972.

Washington (CNN) -- Think of pop-tops, and a soda can might come to mind. But Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe sees pop-tops as a way to help hundreds of women in Gulu, Uganda, start a new life. Nyirumbe sells women's purses made out of the aluminum tabs, and so far she has sold more than 500 purses for about $3,000. All of the proceeds go to the people who made them -- her students at the St. Monica's Girls' Tailoring Center. Eight years ago, Nyirumbe started the school in Gulu to help poor young girls and women caught in the middle of the decades-long Ugandan civil war. Many of the women had become mothers after they were abducted and raped by rebels in the Lord's Resistance Army. Nyirumbe's school feeds and rehabilitates more than 300 mothers and their babies each year. It also provides free medical care and teaches the mothers valuable life skills, such as sewing, cooking and cleaning.