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| The exhibition at UNESCO, showing Elizabeth, in a photograph by Nichole Sobecki |
Six-year-old
Elizabeth lives in Kibera, a huge slum near the Kenyan capital Nairobi and the
largest urban slum in Africa. Each day, dressed in her bright uniform, she
walks for more than an hour across a harsh landscape to get to primary school. She is
one of millions of children who must take a perilous path daily just to acquire
an education.
Elizabeth and a number of other children are featured in a photo exhibition that’s currently
being shown in Paris on the metal fencing around the headquarters of UNESCO,
the United Nations cultural agency.
Titled “Journeys to School”, the exhibition
premiered at the UN in New York and will travel around the world until 2015,
providing a testament to "children’s courage and determination" in the face of
educational obstacles,
“These images
capture the extraordinary resolve of boys and girls to overcome all challenges
– whether these concern gender, disability, location, ethnicity, conflict or
natural disasters,” she said.
Opening the
exhibition in Paris on a rainy afternoon earlier this month, she commented that
“"rain is the least difficult of all obstacles for these children on their
way to school.”
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| Santiago on his way to school. |
Imagine the
journey that 14-year-old Santiago Muñoz does in New York, for instance. Each
school day, he has to take two buses and two different trains, for a trek of
two hours to school. His family lives in public housing in Far Rockaway,
located at the southern end of the borough of Queens. But Santiago attends a
much-admired public high school in the north Bronx, where he was accepted
because of his good grades.
Across the
globe, in a city of refugees on the border between Myanmar and Thailand, Wai
Wai Htun lives in a slum with other migrant families from Myanmar. “She must
walk 40 minutes to the stop for the makeshift rickshaw, without which it would
be impossible to go to school,” according to the exhibition.
Lack of
proper public transportation is just one of the obstacles that many children
face in poor communities. UN officials say that other challenges include discrimination,
religious “tensions”, crime, natural disasters (such as the earthquake in Haiti
and the tsunami in Japan), disability, gender inequality and political conflict.
Schools in
fact are often the first to suffer the consequences of armed conflict, and
“mines and unexploded ordnance pose a continuing danger to children”, UNESCO
says. The photographs by Olivier Jobard show 11 year-old Amal Al Torchani in
Misrata, Libya, attending school in surroundings that still bear the marks of warfare.
Mexican
photographer Rodrigo Cruz, who has won several awards for his human rights
work, portrays schoolchildren of the Tarahumara Indian community who live in Copper Canyon, or Barranca del Cobre, in northwestern Mexico. For Esmeralda and Patricia (9 and
10 years old), walking is the only means of transportation. They cross canyons,
climb steep slopes, traverse pine forests and pass beneath barbed wire fence to
get to school, according to the exhibition.
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| Pedestrians stop to view the photos. |
"These stories reveal the tremendous resilience
of children, their mothers, their fathers, their teachers, volunteers and NGOs
and a common determination to build a future made better through education,”
said Miguel Ferro, the president of the photojournalism agency SIPA PRESS,
which produced the exhibition in association with UNESCO and public
transportation company Transdev.
The children who do make it to school by whatever
means could be considered the lucky ones, as some 61 million children and 71
million adolescents do not attend school, according to figures from the UN.
The
organization is calling on governments to strengthen their education policies
as part of the Global Education First Initiative, a five-year project sponsored
by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that aims to "renew and reinvigorate global
commitments to education".
One of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals is to see
all children attaining primary schooling by 2015. Although many countries have improved access to education in the past decade, officials say that much still needs to be done, especially for marginalized communities.
