Children attending Amani Children’s Family Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya, are first given warm water, bathing soap and a seaweed-based body gel for washing before entering their classrooms, because they lack clean water at home. If they need to wash their uniforms, they are given a change of school uniform and a place to dry their clothes. Most of the children live in informal settlements that lack clean water, sanitation and hygiene; school is their only provider of these essential public health needs.
They are taught to clean the school that offers them not only an education but also essential hygiene items, from toothpaste and toothbrushes to sanitary napkins, that are so important for girls’ safety. Otherwise, they are vulnerable to men buying them pads in return for sex.
The school is run by Catholic nuns whose goal is to spread their model throughout Kenya in synchrony with the Day of the African Child 2026 theme “Ensuring Universal Access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Every Child in Africa.” This is a critical right for every child, ensuring they grow up in a safe environment, have good health, safe food, and clean water.
Determined to get to school, Lorna, 15, has to swim the Kemp Welch River in the Rigo district of Papua New Guinea. Her dream is to be a pilot or a teacher, and like all the students, she wants a new bridge, which was washed away in 2012, to get to school safely. Due to the climate cris, conditions have only worsened. Her further obstacle is that elders do not allow girls to swim the river when they have their periods, fearing their blood will attract crocodiles.
Half the world’s children now live with at least three climate hazards at once, “threatening their health, education and survival.” UNICEF analyzed youth’s exposure to heatwaves, coastal floods, extreme heat, fire, river floods, sand and dust storms, and tropical storms. The Sahel region of Africa is “one of the hardest hit globally,” and children in South Asian countries, especially Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan, are “exposed to more climate hazards than anyone else in the world.”
Israel has intentionally bombed 93% of Gaza’s school buildings over the past three years, rendering them non-functional and causing youth’s education to cease. Moreover, 20,000 children and at least 530 teachers were killed among a people that had a 97% literacy rate — one of the highest in the world. (The United States has an adult literacy rate of 79%.)
Soon after the 2025 “ceasefire” (with scorched-earth bombing reduced to sporadic attacks), a Gazan woman opened Al-Karma School. With hundreds of teachers now volunteering, 400,000 children are enrolled in some type of school program with a reduced curriculum, yet 130,000 children are still not enrolled. UNICEF and others have provided some resources. A volunteer Arabic-language interpreter spoke for the students: “Children in Palestine have the right to learn, play and achieve the hopes and ambitions that the war has killed.”
In stark contrast to children’s education threatened by extreme poverty, climate hazards and genocide, consider what the U.S. and British defense industries are doing by way of youth education.
Raytheon (now RTX Corporation), one of the largest arms manufacturers, sponsors the nonprofit MATHCOUNTS Foundation that provides math programs, scholarships and contests for middle school students and teachers in every U.S. state. With its partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA and their lofty sounding affirmative action goal of diversifying the STEM workforce, they encourage girls to see themselves as robotics engineers, artificial intelligence and data scientists and cybersecurity professionals who will be part of a workforce ensuring a better future. Schools become “recruiting grounds” for children, middle and high school students, where arms companies conceal their real purpose: arms manufacturing and systems in support of war, the primary tool the United States has used since World War II to dominate the world.
All of the other major arms dealers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and BAE Systems — do likewise, from reading fairy tales to children to sponsoring math and computer science contests for high school students, to offering internships and scholarships to top students for a career in weapons manufacturing. Their rhetoric is to empower girls and to create data-science and other science opportunities for youth, while their real intent is to whitewash their reputation as merchants of death — training kids to bomb kids. Consider the tragic irony of a Raytheon Tomahawk missile launched this past February to destroy a girls’ school in Iran, killing 156 mostly female students.
The defense industry — one of the largest contributors, if not the largest, to the climate crisis — has been exempt from having to report on its greenhouse gas emissions since 1997 at the insistence of the United States.
Pat Hynes, an ardent feminist, social justice and environmental activist, is a member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice and WILPF USA. She dedicates this column to Gloria Matlock whose Twice as Smart education program gives children more.