Sudan’s children face ‘generational catastrophe’

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Sudan’s children face ‘generational catastrophe’

Nearly every school-age child in Sudan is missing out on education, either completely or facing serious disruption, aid organisations have warned.

Schools in some states were reopened this week after delays due to severe flooding but millions of children are still unable to go, leaving the country facing a generational catastrophe Poverty, a lack of qualified teachers and strikes by teachers, the Covid-19 epidemic and low vaccination rates are some of the factors that have contributed to the crisis.

More than 600 schools were destroyed during August and September due to floods and attacks by militias, according to the education ministry. Schools are often just shells of buildings, lacking furniture, running water or toilets.

Nearly 7 million of Sudan's children aged between six and 18 or a third of school-age children are not in school at all, according to a joint statement by Unicef and Save the Children.

The worst-affected state is central Darfur, where 63% of children do not go to school, in West Darfur the figure is 58% and in eastern Kassala the figure is 56%.

The statement said that the education of a further 12 million children will be severely interrupted by a lack of sufficient teachers, infrastructure and an enabling learning environment to help them reach their full potential.

Most of the pupils in classrooms have fallen behind in their learning; 70% of 10 year-olds in public schools can't read a simple sentence, according to Unicef.

Owen Watkins, communications chief at Unicef Sudan, said it was a generational catastrophe. Children are the future of a country. Investing in them is the right thing to do and they will contribute greatly to the future GDP of the country.

He added that the children in school are not only concerned with maths, reading and writing. They learn social skills in a protected environment. A teacher and former head of a school in Um-Oshar, Ahmed el-Safi said on his street of 20 houses three to four children in each household were not attending school.

He said that many of them have to go to the market to sell plastic bags or anything just to feed themselves.

Despite being a teacher and head of a school at one point in his life, I found out that my son used to miss classes to go and sell tickets at a cinema in Omdurman. When I asked him, he told me that he could not go to school, while some essentials are missing in his life. You know they pay us very little, and as teachers we could not feed our children properly.

I could not send my three children to university. They finished high school and helped their little brother go to university, who studied media, but he never got a job. He became a builder, which doesn't require any media skills.

Even the ones who go to school can't learn anything, as classes are overcrowded with sometimes up to 140 pupils. All the classrooms collapsed in the floods, even our houses collapsed, and we are now in tents, said Mahmoud Ishag, 55, a teacher and father of 16, who lost his 10 year-old son in the disaster.

The teachers and schoolchildren turned into sellers in the markets. I now sell onions in the market instead of teaching, but the majority of my children are girls so they can't work.