A report launched by Save the Children claims that children's education has not been able to get the due priority it deserves during disaster responses and that only two percent of humanitarian aid funds education.

The report, titled ‘Education Disrupted’, researched how schools and children’s education were interrupted over five disasters in 2015 – Nepal Earthquake, Typhoon Koppu (Philippines), Cyclone Pam (Vanuatu), and Myanmar Floods.

In Nepal, an estimated 3.2 million children were directly affected both physically and mentally by the earthquake. Of these, around 870,000 children were left without permanent classrooms and an additional half a million required support to return to learning.

This compounded the negative impact on their education over their whole school experience. After a year of earthquakes in Nepal, children are still being taught in temporary learning centres that were actually meant for use for weeks and maybe months, not years.

“Our children face grave issues of losing out on educational opportunities, and being harmed or killed in pursuit of education, because of disasters,” said Delailah Borja, Country Director of Save the Children in Nepal. “As Asia is the world's most disaster prone region, 200 million children’s lives is estimated to be severely disrupted each year. We must enhance both hardware and software to ensure that the education sector is kept safe from disasters,” she added.

The research identified significant gaps in information on the impact of disasters on education, which points to a lack of official data collection and analysis on the number of children and schools affected.