The COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions put in place across the globe has set back years of hard-earned educational gains causing the biggest educational crisis since World War II. Since the pandemic first hit, at least one third of the world’s school children have not been able to access any form of learning, close to half a billion students are still affected by prolonged school closures, and 24 million of the most marginalised children, of which almost half are girls, are at risk of never returning to a classroom. Whether this has been caused by their parents’ loss of livelihoods, a pressure to take up child labour or care for siblings, the barriers that these children already faced have become even harder to break down. And for some the alternative is even more dire. We need to act, and we need to act now because every child deserves a future.