Displaced Sudanese children catch up on lost schooling years

At the Al-Hishan displacement camp in the city of Port Sudan, children are grateful to be back in the classroom.

They are some of the estimated 8 million youngsters who have not been able to attend school since the start of Sudan’s civil war in April 2023.

Although laughter fills the camp now, most of them arrived traumatised by often multiple displacements, starvation, and the horrors they had witnessed.

Their drawings, educators say, were at first dominated by war. Depictions of the tanks, weapons, and death they saw as their families fled.

"I am so happy that after all these years, I am teaching children and that they can benefit from my experience," says teacher, Soad Awadallah.

Without education, children lose more than just learning. They lose protection, routine, hope, and the skills needed to rebuild their country.

Now, children at this camp are racing to make up for the years stolen by the war, including 14-year-old Ibrahim, a quiet, but determined boy.

"I miss my friends and my family, I miss my school in Khartoum, it was full of trees. Besides education, I hope everyone returns home,” he says.

Tents arranged in a square function as an elementary school for more than 1,000 children, nearly a third of whom required an accelerated curriculum to make up for lost time.

With each passing day, the learning crisis deepens while the country also risks raising a generation without the needed skills. 

"More than eight million children are out of school because schools are being used as centres for the displaced or by warring parties,” says UNICEF’s spokesperson in Sudan, Mira Nasser.

"Here they can at least get a sense of normalcy, even in a displacement site. They can resume their education, they can play, they can make friends," she says

The organisation says that, across Sudan, five million children are internally displaced, and millions are going hungry.

All they want to do is go home, but at least the makeshift school in the Al-Hishan camp is helping them dream of a better future.