Stories from the Frontlines: Education Cannot Wait Interviews Author Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb © Education Cannot Wait

Stories from the Frontlines: Education Cannot Wait Interviews Author Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times, one of Britain’s leading foreign journalists, and a bestselling author. She has been awarded Foreign Correspondent of the Year six times and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Society of Editors and the Outstanding Impact Award by Amnesty International.

Christina was a keynote moderator and participant during Education Cannot Wait’s (ECW) “Spotlight on Afghanistan” session at last year's HighLevel Financing Conference in Geneva. In June 2023, Christina Lamb was appointed as an ECW Global Champion.

ECW: June 14, 2024, marked 1,000 days since the girls’ secondary education ban in Afghanistan. On that tragic milestone, ECW launched phase two of its global #AfghanGirlsVoices advocacy campaign. In addition to the campaign, how can the world further activate political leadership, and how can global partners—UN, CSOs, governments, and the public— support a return to schooling for all girls in Afghanistan?

Christina Lamb: We should all feel ashamed that there is a country on the planet in 2024 where girls are not allowed to go to school. Yet, three years after the Taliban takeover, sometimes it feels as if the world has just moved on. Meanwhile, girls in Afghanistan are losing hope. Unfortunately, the Taliban is a reality, but no one I know in Afghanistan wants their daughters imprisoned at home. This needs to be called out as what it is—gender apartheid. I think any engagement with the Taliban by the international community should be conditional, and all global partners should be doing everything to put pressure on them, if not directly, then through others that the Taliban listen to, such as leaders from the Islamic world and influential clerics. I raise the issue on every platform I can. In the meantime, we should do everything we can to support girls through online learning by providing books and materials to the brave activists running home schools and sharing #AfghanGirlsVoices.

ECW: You are a leading voice on girls’ and women’s rights, a best-selling author, and a tireless advocate for the world’s most vulnerable people. Why do you do what you do? What stories of girls caught in crisis and denied their right to education have inspired you most, and why did you decide to become an ECW Global Champion?

Christina Lamb: I started my career wanting to be a novelist, but I found real-life stories compelling, particularly as the first place I went to as a foreign correspondent was Afghanistan, a land of oral tradition and great storytellers. My job is telling stories for those with no platform, and I have always been motivated by exposing injustice.

I have been a foreign correspondent for 36 years. Wherever I have worked—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—it has always seemed clear that the biggest thing that changes people’s lives is education, particularly girls’ education. Teaching girls leads to improved health and raises family income—statistics show what I have seen for myself.

ECW: We live in challenging times. Overseas development assistance is shrinking while armed conflicts hit inflection points in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond, and climate change impacts continue to increase—all impacting vulnerable children’s right to education. Why should public and private sector donors provide increased funding for education in emergencies and protracted crises?

Christina Lamb: We certainly live in challenging times, and my job as a war correspondent has never been so busy, for we have fewer correspondents and more conflicts than ever since World War II. Sadly, we don’t seem very good at focusing on more than one or two issues at a time, so conflicts like Afghanistan, Sudan, and Ethiopia are being forgotten.

Moreover, many people in developed nations are suffering the cost of living crises, seeing their healthcare systems unable to cope, and want to close their borders to desperate people coming in. That’s exactly why we should help people in their countries, to help them find employment and their rights be protected at home. Public and private sector donors can play an important role by increasing their funding for education in emergencies.

ECW: Your book Our Bodies, Their Battlefields takes us closer than ever to the stark reality facing girls and women during armed conflicts. How can accessing the safety, hope, and opportunity of a quality education safeguard human rights and provide new opportunities for girls and women everywhere?

Christina Lamb: As a female war correspondent, I’ve always been most interested in what happens to women in war, a story that long went untold. To me, women are the real heroes of the war as they keep life together, educating and protecting children and the elderly. But there is also a dark side—the use of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, something that seems to be happening more and more, most recently in Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the use of sexual violence is the world’s most neglected war crime, where accountability is the exception, not the rule. Access to quality education teaches girls about their rights—but also the boys. From what I have seen, there is very little point in making women aware of their rights if you don’t do anything to change the male mindset.