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In 2007, UNICEF initiated the Girls’ Education Movement (GEM) throughout Southern Sudan. The Baya Primary School GEM club has been since 2008. Chaired by a dynamic 13-year-old, Tabitha Morris, it has 50 members who organize various activities using the ‘edutainment’ approach – with skits, dramas, rallies, dance and visits to the community.

All children in South Sudan have the right to education. And the child-to-child approach taken by GEM clubs offers one good alternative for helping girls get an education.

But while the Unesco report examines the effects of conflict on education, it criticises donor countries for skewing assistance towards a small group of "strategic" countries while neglecting the world's other equally poor and equally conflict-affected countries. While aid for basic education increased more than fivefold in Afghanistan during the past five years, for example, it stagnated or declined in other conflict-affected countries, such as Ivory Coast.

Globally, more children are going to school than ever before but, according to the report, the number of children out of school is falling far too slowly, and progress is far too varied across the different regions of the world.

Half-of the world's out-of-school children live in just 15 countries. The largest population of out-of-school children is in Nigeria (8.3 million), followed by Pakistan (7.3 million), India (5.6 million), Ethiopia (2.7 million), and Bangladesh (2 million)

In sub-Saharan Africa, about 10 million children drop out of school every year

It also points to key capacity gaps – for example, that another 1.9 million teachers will be needed by 2015 to achieve universal primary education

“Young people and their education are critical to a country's future. The Thai Government promises to make sure its schools can function, even in a disaster, which is a powerful statement about its commitment to human development and resilience.”

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

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.

UNICEF provides BRAC schools with educational materials, including recorded episodes of a Dari-language version of its ‘Meena’ cartoon series, a successful advocacy and teaching tool developed in South Asia. Like other viewers of the cartoon programme, girls at the BRAC school are fond of Meena, a spirited nine-year-old girl who braves the world tackling issues that affect children just like themselves.

BRAC currently supports over 2,500 community-based schools in Afghanistan, with some 84,500 students – mainly girls – enrolled.

World literature will also have greater space in this curriculum.

Languages are an important component of the international curriculum. The students are also expected to study three languages, rather than just two. Compulsory languages are English and either Hindi or another local language, as is already the case in the regular curriculum, plus a foreign language. Options could include French, Russian, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

Anjali Chhabra, education officer at the CBSE in New Delhi told India Real Time that subjects will be taught with a more global perspective. For instance, when it comes to history there will be more space for world history, rather than just Indian history, as is the case in the regular curriculum.

So far, only ten schools across India have applied for the international syllabus.

In a major leap for India’s education system the country’s Central Board of Secondary Education has decided to go international with a brand new curriculum.