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According to Mehyar Hamadi, a child protection officer in the Governorate of Ariana in Greater Tunis, children who left school before the age of 16 and who are unable, or unwilling, to resume their education, usually stay in limbo. Some go to social integrations centers, known as CDIS, where they can learn some basic skills, attend some cultural activities, or learn how to use computers. Most, however, prefer to work, and hide their age to be able to do so.

“Money, or rather lack of it – is most often the cause of the problem,” he says. “Poverty, especially when combined with lack of education or awareness, is a breeding ground for violence, exploitation, deprivations, abandonment and all sorts of abuses against children.”

TUNIS, 9 February 2011 – He says he’s 16, but he looks 14, if he is a day. I met him at the fish market in central Tunis, on a weekday, at a time when he should have been in school. Hamza left school two years ago. He says the school principal kicked him out, for no valid reason. According to recent data, 98 per cent of children of primary-school age in Tunisia are entering primary school. Thousands of them, however, drop out every year, although education is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 16. In 2009, an estimated 69,000 children left school.

“I don’t know when school will start. I know that it’s not good for me to be sitting at home, but none of the teachers have returned to Beoua as their homes are still occupied by the military,” says Pafait.

Several schools in western Côte d’Ivoire remain closed, due to the occupying of teachers homes and, in some cases, school buildings by the armed forces. UNICEF is currently actively engaged in negotiations with the Government of Côte d’Ivoire to get the occupied homes and buildings vacated immediately.

Learning in a safe and protective environment is crucial for a child. One of UNICEF’s main challenges here remains access to education for the most vulnerable children in the conflict-affected areas because of insecurity.

The report, called the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, has been conducted every two years since 1977, making it the longest continuing survey of young people in Canada and one of the longest in the world. Nearly 9,300 students in Grades 7 to 12 from 181 different Ontario schools participated in the most recent survey, which was conducted from October, 2010, to June, 2011.

Online or cyber-bullying was also much more common among females, with 28 per cent of girls reporting being targeted by cyber-bullying compared to just 15 per cent of boys.

The overall rates haven’t really changed since 2003, the first year CAMH monitored bullying at school. But the survey found that females are more likely to be bullied. Thirty-one per cent of adolescent girls reported being victimized in the most recent survey, compared to 26 per cent for boys.

This raises several questions: Do boys get along better than girls? Have programs aimed at curbing bullying failed to reach girls?

“The problem is girls do it all underneath the surface,” said Haley Higdon, a facilitator with the SNAP for Schools program.The SNAP (Stop Now and Plan) model is designed to help reach children with behavioural problems or other issues. As a facilitator, Ms. Higdon works in classrooms in the Toronto District School Board. Often, the behavioural problems she encounters stem from bullying.

With boys, bullying is typically much easier to detect because male bullies often resort to physical measures, such as fighting. With girls, the behaviour can be much more subtle, making it more difficult for teachers to detect.

Bullying can take on many forms. It’s not just one child pushing another in the schoolyard – it is any aggressive or unwanted behaviour that involves a real or perceived imbalance in power, according to StopBullying.gov, a U.S. government website.

In Niger, 66 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line and educational indicators are already among the lowest in the world. Given these conditions, the importance of keeping children in school cannot be overstated.

The UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) and its partners are setting up provisional schoolrooms in Port-au-Prince and other areas, as schools destroyed in the quake are being rebuilt.

Haiti’s educational system, said Marc Vergara of the agency, virtually ceased to function in affected areas, leaving about 2.5 million children out of school after the earthquake.Together with the ministry of education, Unicef is helping to establish more than 150 tent schools to get children back to school before April.With more than half of school-age children not attending classes prior to the quake, the agency’s goal is to "build back better" to create conditions to allow many young Haitians to attend school for the first time.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has recorded numerous aftershocks, the largest of 6.9 magnitude.

As the tsunami radiated across the Pacific, Japan warned that a wave of 3m (10ft) or higher could hit the Pacific coast of its island of Honshu. The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says the waves so far have been small but officials say worse could still be to come. The biggest wave so far has been just over one metre.

Chile suffered the biggest earthquake of the 20th century when a 9.5 magnitude quake struck the city of Valdivia in 1960, killing 1,655 people.

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete. “At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.”

Istanbul stands out among threatened cities in developing countries because it is trying to get ahead of the risk. A first step was an earthquake master plan drawn up for the city and the federal government by Dr. Erdik’s team and researchers at three other Turkish universities in 2006. Such a plan is a rarity outside of rich cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles.Carrying out its long list of recommendations has proved more challenging, given that the biggest source of political pressure in Istanbul, as with most crowded cities, is not an impending earthquake but traffic, crime, jobs and other real-time troubles.Nonetheless, with the urgency amplified by the lessons from Haiti’s devastation, Istanbul is doing what it can to gird for its own disaster.

But a push is also coming from the bottom, as nonprofit groups, recognizing the limits of centralized planning, train dozens of teams of volunteers in poor districts and outfit them with radios, crowbars and first-aid kits so they can dig into the wreckage when their neighborhoods are shaken.

Under a program financed with more than $800 million in loans from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and more in the pipeline from other international sources, Turkey is in the early stages of bolstering hundreds of the most vulnerable schools in Istanbul, along with important public buildings and more than 50 hospitals. With about half of the nearly 700 schools assessed as high priorities retrofitted or replaced so far, progress is too slow to suit many Turkish engineers and geologists tracking the threat. But in districts where the work has been done or is under way — those closest to the Marmara Sea and the fault — students, parents and teachers express a sense of relief tempered by the knowledge that renovations only cut the odds of calamity.

“I hope it’s enough,” said Serkan Erdogan, an English teacher at the Bakirkoy Cumhuriyet primary school close to the Marmara coast, where $315,000 was spent to add reinforced walls, jackets of fresh concrete and steel rebar around old columns and to make adjustments as simple as changing classroom doors to open outward, easing evacuations. “The improvements are great, but the building may still collapse,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with that risk. The children need to know what they should do.”In a fifth-grade classroom, the student training that goes with the structural repairs was evident as Nazan Sati, a social worker, asked the 11-year-olds what they would do if an earthquake struck right at that moment. At first a forest of hands shot toward the ceiling. Ms. Sati quickly told them to show, not tell. In a mad, giggling scramble, the students dove beneath their desks. But the threat for children, and their parents, also lies outside the school walls, in mile upon mile of neighborhoods filled with structures called gecekondu, meaning “landed overnight,” because they were constructed seemingly instantly as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural regions flowed into the city seeking work in the past decade or two.

According to US AID, there are approximately 600,000 displaced people living in 416 makeshift camps in Port-au-Prince. Sanitation conditions in the camps remain a grave concern. With heavy seasonal rains fast approaching, the population is extremely vulnerable to exposure and water-born disease.

Two leading directors of Doctors Without Borders have called the relief effort to date "broadly insufficient." In a March 5 interview, they say that, “The lack of shelter and the hygiene conditions represent a danger not only in terms of public health, but they are also an intolerable breach of the human dignity of all these people.”

Conditions are also critical outside the earthquake zone. Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city located 120 km north of Port au Prince, has received an estimated influx of 50,000 refugees. Its mayor, Michel St. Croix, recently told the Miami Herald, “We need housing, sanitation, security -- we need everything.'' He said the city has received next to no assistance from the United Nations nor the International Red Cross.

In an interview with Associated Press on March 5, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive repeated his government’s growing concern with the international aid effort. "Too many people are raising money without any controls, and don't explain what they're doing with it."

Farmer warned against the “trauma vultures” descending on Haiti. He asked why so many years of aid and charitable funds going to Haiti has left the country poorer than ever.

Canada was one of the few large countries in the world that did not send civilian emergency rescue teams to Haiti. Its official aid mission arrived one week after the earthquake in the form of two warships and 2,000 military personnel. They pitched into the relief effort and earned praise for their work. But most of the assistance brought by the military, including its field hospital in Léogâne and its emergency health center in Jacmel, have now been withdrawn.

“The Canadian military is not a relief agency. It helped out with short-term needs. Aid and reconstruction is a long-term process. Who is going to pick up where the military’s work left off?”

Prior to the earthquake, Cuba had some 350 health professionals volunteering in Haiti. That number, including graduates and students from the Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in Cuba, has expanded considerably. Since 2005, 550 Haitian doctors have graduated from ELAM. The school received its first Haitian students in 1999. Currently, there are 570 students from Haiti attending the school.

Timely and informative articles and videos are also posted to the website of the Canada Haiti Action Network (http://canadahaitiaction.ca/) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (http://ijdh.org/).

By participating in group activities, children can express themselves and channel their trauma through song, poetry and dance. With this in mind, AVSI has been training teachers to nurture displaced and vulnerable children. The training has produced significant changes in the philosophy and practice of education in Walikale.

“In the past, we would whip the children,” said Mr. Zirhumana Muzirhu. “But thanks to the psycho-social training, teachers and schoolchildren are now friends, so we don’t use the whip anymore.” The education-in-emergencies programme is also rehabilitating schools and providing school supplies and recreation kits, so that students can participate in regular activities that are crucial to their physical, mental, psychological and social development. In addition, the programme has provided more than 130,000 children with education kits in conflict-ravaged North Kivu Province in recent years.

“I like going to school and hope to finish it, but I’m not sure if another war will break out and make me displaced again,” she said. “My biggest fear is, I don’t know if my children will finish school one day,” admitted her mother.

It aims to facilitate the empowerment of adolescent girls by working with governments and civil society on policies to that effect. In a joint statement, the UNAGTF organisations listed educating adolescent girls, improving their health, protecting them from violence, promoting their leadership, and collect statistic data on them as five priorities in their efforts to advance the rights of adolescent girls.

Karim praised the work of U.N. agencies in Malawi, where adolescent girls face many challenges, including early marriage and early childbearing, which pose serious health risks. Additionally, females account for more than half of all HIV infections in Malawi. The level of sexual and reproductive health of girls in Malawi is among the worst in the world.

"The UNFPA has mobilised and worked with the National Youth Council [of Malawi] to advocate against a bill on child marriage that was going to go to parliament that would have made the legal age of a marriage 16," she said.

Wong also stressed the importance of respecting local culture while introducing new ideas and relevant practices. In Ethiopia, for example, UNFPA has found that working with the community is enormously beneficial, particularly in bringing about long-term change that seriously improves the lives and futures of adolescent girls.

Perhaps the biggest drama though has played out in violence-plagued Acapulco, where thousands of teachers have demonstrated and almost 200 schools in the area have been paralyzed by a month of strike action to persuade authorities to improve security amid extortion threats.

The fears appear excessive but are "part of the deterioration of daily life in some communities, as violence affects civilians in public places," according to Javier Oliva, an expert in security issues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Two weeks ago the government said classes would resume, after they promised to install panic buttons in schools and police patrols nearby, but the protest continued.Acapulco street seller Elizabeth Garcia, a 26-year-old mother of two, said she felt calmer keeping her kids at home."I don't know if it's better that they don't go to school, but at least I know where they are," Garcia said.