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More than 1.5 million people have displaced by the quake, according to local news services that quoted the director of Chile's emergency management office. In Concepción, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.

While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.

Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.

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 percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole," says Chris Low. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote It's like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold” End Quote Michel DeGraff Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT "So it's really apartheid through language."

He argues that French should be taught in Haiti as a second-language - after children have learnt basic literacy skills in Creole. "Learning to first read and write in a foreign language is somewhat like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold, and the blindfold is never taken off," he told the BBC World Service.

No matter which indicators you pick, Haiti has an appalling record on education. One recent report rated it as the third worst place in the world, after Somalia and Eritrea, to go to school. Continue reading the main story A brief history of Haitian Creole It emerged towards the end of the 18th Century as slaves from Africa began mixing African languages with French Lots of the vocabulary comes from French, but the grammar is quite different Spelling was standardised in 1979 A law called the Bernard Reform was introduced in the early 1980s, designed to boost Creole in schools The 1987 constitution states that French and Creole are both official languages in Haiti It's estimated that about one-third of children never enrol at primary school, and only about one in 10 complete secondary school.

UNESCO staff in Gaza recruited Souktel to create an SMS alert/survey system that warns parents and their children of any danger happening near local schools. The service forms a key part of UNESCO’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Reduction project, which aims to ensure that schools are secure community spaces.

"In conflict zones, when it's not safe to leave your house to get information, mobile phones can bridge the gap and keep everyone connected," says Souktel co-founder Jacob Korenblum. "This basic technology allows aid workers, educators and local families to stay in contact at all times." 

Here’s how it works: At each school, principals and teachers are given password-protected access to a web interface, where they can send SMS alerts to all parents’ mobile phones. In an emergency, they could write, "Attack near school today, please keep your children at home." Once the violence has ended, another message could go out saying, "Shelling has stopped; please come to school this morning."

Thousands of children are too frightened to go to school or suffer depression and even attempt suicide after being targeted by ‘cyber bullies’, according to a study.It found 28 per cent of children aged 11 to 16 had experienced bullying on the internet or via a mobile phone.

Children from an ethnic minority background are more likely to be targeted, with ‘white non-British’ youngsters the most at risk from persistent cyber bullying. The report stated this indicated ‘recent immigrants’ were most at risk.

The survey of 4,600 children was carried out by the charity Beatbullying and the National Association of Head Teachers, and the issue will be highlighted tonight in a BBC1 Panorama programme called Hunting The Internet Bullies.

Teachers in Uganda are striking for a salary increase which will provide them with a living wage Teachers in Uganda earn as little as $96 a month under conditions where inflation is running at 20+%. The teachers – who are members of the union Ugandan National Teachers Association (UNATU) are demanding a 100% rise. Teachers are among the worst paid government employees in the country – yet Yoweri Museveni – President of Uganda since 1986 – says that an increase for teachers is not a priority. Instead the government is prioritising infrastructure which will allow it to become one of the world’s top 50 oil producers.

Teachers have been subjected to harrassment, verbal abuse, arrests and forced apologies at the hands of the security services.

the Kenyan National Union of Teachers (KNUT), urged “the government to declare the shortage of teachers a national disaster,” reported the national newspaper Daily Nation.

“It is a serious disaster and parents and people of goodwill should join us in this mother of all strikes, he added. We cannot accept to have schools where 3.4 million children are receiving a half-baked education.”

Kenya has not increased its teacher stock since 1999 [...] Kenya has merely been replacing teachers lost due to attrition. As a result the country has 40,000 trained teachers roaming the streets.”