The tragic emergency of the millions of refugees and displaced persons caused by the many conflicts in the African continent becomes even more acute for those who suffer it on their skin when they are of school age. Ensuring the right to education for them becomes crucial.
The issue has been addressed in recent weeks regarding the condition of students from Sudan and refugees in Egypt: at a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries, it was decided to set 28 December 2024 as the date for the end-of-year exams for the 2023 academic year. Fides, the Church’s missionary agency, reports.
According to government sources, there are about 1.2 million Sudanese refugees in Egypt, while the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has registered 834,000.
Children fleeing Sudan under the age of 16 are not required to register upon arrival in Egypt. Schooling costs, the redistribution of Sudanese child refugees in Egyptian schools, their integration and the disorganisation of schools and forms of education dedicated to them are the main problems faced by minors who manage to register, while according to the NGO Human Rights Watch, for those who do not register, the right to education in Egypt is not guaranteed. And this applies not only to Sudanese, but also to those from other war zones, such as Palestinian refugees.
The education to which minors who arrived as refugees in Egypt potentially have access is, however, a luxury when compared to the condition of minors who remained in Sudan. According to the latest estimates reported by the BBC, as many as five million children are internally displaced in the country. For them, the need is to try to survive the violence and widespread food insecurity, and education takes second place.
Vast areas of the African continent are today torn apart by conflicts, violence practised by armed groups, struggles for control of resources: West Africa and the Sahel, Nigeria Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia…everywhere schools and education are among the first victims of armed clashes, because the continuation of ordinary educational activities is perceived as an obstacle for militia action. The UN estimates this year that almost 40 per cent of attacks on schools worldwide occur in Africa, where more than two and a half thousand have been recorded in recent years.
In the Sahel there are currently as many as 14,000 schools closed, with as many as two and a half million children unable to go to school. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the problem is widespread in the eastern regions, where both extremist armed groups and groups supported by neighbouring countries operate. At the beginning of this year alone, as many as five hundred schools were closed in North Kivu, a figure that is not expected to improve by 2024, given the persistent violence. In total, according to estimates published by Unesco last September, 30% of all minors in the world who do not go to school are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa alone.
The problem becomes more acute when one takes into account that the population of the continent is the youngest in the world. A high number of children out of school due to conflicts adds uncertainty and new problems regarding future prospects. Curing schooling can guarantee economic development that is as widespread as possible, but today too many children and young people are refugees due to wars or still live in the slums of large cities (according to Unicef data updated to 2020 there are more than 1.8 billion of them in the world, concentrated mainly in Africa and Asia) and they risk remaining on the margins of society for the rest of their lives.
In the cases of children who do not go to school because of conflicts, the phenomenon also takes on gender characteristics, because girls are often the first to stop going to school and the last to resume their studies after conflicts have ended.
Cosimo Graziani, Fides
