Getting to School Shouldn’t Be This Dangerous
Many children around the world miss school or drop out altogether because the journey is too risky.

For the past 10 months, children in Indonesia’s Banten province have been commuting to school on narrow bamboo rafts—along a river best known to tourists for its whitewater rapids—because local authorities still haven’t fixed a bridge that collapsed in January in a flood. In China, a group of children in Guangxi province, some as young as four years old, also travel to school along a river on flimsy rafts because other routes to the school, along a flooded mountain path, are even more dangerous.
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Progress has slowed most in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than half of the world’s out-of-school children. In countries like Nigeria, the population is outpacing the build-up of needed infrastructure. Only 62 percent of children in the Philippines attended high school between 2007 and 2008. In India, the number of out-of-school children fell 67 percent from 2003 to 8.1 million in 2009.










This post originally appeared on Quartz, an Atlantic sister site.