Quote of the Day
“The impact of conflict on children is everyone’s responsibility, and it must be everyone’s concern.”
— Graça Machel
Machel made this argument in her landmark 1996 United Nations study on the impact of armed conflict on children. The study followed two years of visits to conflict-affected countries and conversations with children, families, humanitarian workers and governments.
There is something difficult about the word everyone.
It removes one of our easiest excuses.
We can say the war is happening somewhere else. The children are not ours. The people fighting should solve it. Governments should deal with it. International organisations should intervene.
Meanwhile, a child has stopped going to school.
Another has left home with nothing but what the family could carry. Another has learned the sound of gunfire before learning multiplication.
Children do not start wars.
Yet adults can build a conflict so completely around them that war becomes the environment in which they grow up.
That should trouble us even when we do not know their names.
Concern alone will not stop a war. But indifference guarantees something else: that suffering can become ordinary.
And perhaps that is one of the things we should resist most fiercely.
Quote source: United Nations — Graça Machel and the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children
Did You Know?
More adults in sub-Saharan Africa can read than a decade ago. Yet the number who cannot read has also increased.
At first, that sounds impossible.
According to UNESCO, the adult literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 64% in 2015 to 69% in 2023. That is progress.
But during roughly the same period, the number of adults without basic literacy skills increased from 193 million to 217 million. UNESCO explains that rapid population growth is one reason the number can rise even while the percentage improves.
This is why percentages sometimes tell only half a story.
Imagine a town where the share of adults who can read keeps improving, but the town itself is growing even faster. More people are learning to read, while the actual number still being left behind can increase at the same time.
And being unable to read is not simply about books.
Think about the instructions on medicine. A text message from a child’s school. A job advertisement. A bank form. A ballot instruction. A government notice. Information about your rights.
Someone else may have to read these things for you.
That dependence can quietly reduce a person’s choices.
UNESCO’s latest figures, released around International Literacy Day 2026, estimate that 739 million youth and adults worldwide still lack basic literacy skills; 63% are women.
Literacy therefore isn’t only about whether someone went to school.
It is also about whether a person can meet the written world without always needing another person to stand between them and it.
Sources
For discussion: What everyday task becomes much harder when a person cannot comfortably read or write?
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