Primary School Years
The primary school years have their own challenges. Education may be jeopardised by classrooms that have no heating or textbooks, or by poor quality schooling. It is threatened by the family poverty that stops children – particularly girls – going to school. And beyond the school walls, many children suffer exploitation, abuse, violence and neglect. Growing numbers live in institutions, separated from their families. Some are trafficked abroad, or work as labourers in streets or fields. And many have been uprooted from their homes by war. • By the end of the 1990s, almost 18 million children were living in poverty in the region, on less than $2.15 per day. • Education spending fell by 75% in parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus in the 1990s. • Hundreds of thousands of children live in residential institutions across the region. • More than two million people – most of them women and children – are refugees or internally displaced. • Growing numbers of children live and work on the streets. All face discrimination and violence. All are vulnerable to sexual exploitation. • There are no reliable figures on child trafficking, but it is clear that it happens and that its victims face appalling dangers. • Violence against children is found at home, at school, on the streets and in state institutions.
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