This year again, the start of the school year in Africa will be marked by absence. According to the United Nations, 98 million children will not find their way back to school south of the Sahara. The continent alone accounts for 40% of the 244 million children aged 6 to 18 out of school in the world. It is also the only region where school dropout is worsening, according to UNESCO, which underlines in a press release published on September 1 that “out-of-school rates are decreasing more slowly than the growth rate of the age population. school”.

This situation is first and foremost the result of the shock wave of the Covid-19 crisis, which has jeopardized the progress made since 2000 and is still being felt. “School is first and foremost an economic question, and we have seen with the pandemic the return of extreme poverty. We risk witnessing the sacrifice of a generation,” worries Camille Romain des Boscs, president of the NGO World Vision, which provides support to many states on the continent in difficulty.

Because education, even public education, is expensive on the continent. The brutal impoverishment of the poorest, in fragile states devoid of social safety nets, has put millions of children back to work. To reduce expenses, families are also tempted to marry off their daughters earlier. Situations which often result in early pregnancies which permanently keep adolescent girls away from education. The latter are two and a half times more exposed to the risk of being out of school than their male peers.

The crisis is all the more acute as in addition to the closures of educational establishments during the lockdowns, which lasted from a few months to two years (as in Zimbabwe), there are added the inflationary effects of the war in Ukraine – the prices of food and school supplies have soared – and the disruptive effects of the coups d’état which have punctuated the news over the last three years in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and finally in Gabon, including President Ali Bongo was overthrown on August 30. Countries which were already struggling, before Covid, to get all their children into school. In Niger and Chad, for example, almost half of the children were not in school.

“We lack teachers”

If the school calendar is not officially disrupted this year in Bamako, Conakry, Ouagadougou, Niamey or Libreville, the jihadist attacks resulted between January 2021 and May 2022, according to the United Nations count, in multiple school closures. with devastating impact” in Burkina (4,258), Cameroon (3,285), Mali (1,730), Central African Republic (999), Nigeria (934) and Niger (890), causing population displacements which relate to the school systems of neighboring countries such as Ivory Coast or Benin.

Whether due to terrorism, conflicts or the consequences of climate change, these migrations have a lasting effect on the daily lives of the youngest. In Ethiopia, two years of war in the regions of Tigray and then Amhara (2020-2022) deprived 10.5 million schoolchildren of studies, even though the second most populous country on the continent after Nigeria, with 120 million inhabitants, has made enormous educational progress in ten years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which managed to bring 2.5 million children back to school after introducing free education in 2019, still has 7 million young people outside the school system out of 27 million, particularly in the east of the country. Since the start of the year alone, 800,000 children have been displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and more than 2,000 schools have closed due to insecurity or because are occupied by fleeing families.

In the rest of the country, thanks to special youth “enlistment” actions carried out by the Ministry of Primary, Secondary and Technical Education with the support of Unicef, “children find, year after year, the way to school”, testifies Assina Kahamba, director of the Liziba private school group in Kinshasa, still in the “rush” of the start of the school year on Monday: “But the country is facing another major challenge. We lack teachers, and qualified teachers. It is a rare commodity, especially in the public system. »

Students kidnapped and tortured

In Cameroon, it is also the conflict between the separatists of the English-speaking regions of the North-West and South-West and the regular army which threw 700,000 people onto the roads, taking refuge in the neighboring French-speaking areas and in neighboring Nigeria, which alone already has more than 20 million children out of school. And for those who remained in English-speaking lands, going to school, when it is open, has become dangerous and sometimes deadly.

The “Ambaboys” (Ambazonia is the name of the secessionist territory) have made targets of students and teachers, symbols in their eyes of the central power of Yaoundé. They attacked, kidnapped, tortured hundreds of students, parents and teachers. Since the declaration of secession, at least 160 teachers have been killed along with several dozen children, according to the Cameroon Teachers’Trade Union, one of the largest teachers’ unions, which deplores the numerous “dead city” days imposed in seven years. The return to school on September 4 was no exception and the solemn appeal of the President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon to reopen the establishments did nothing.

Added to these “internal” exiles are communities displaced by the effects of climate change, which are increasing droughts, turning rain events into extreme events and undermining subsistence agriculture. According to projections by the Global Center for Climate Mobility, a UN agency, 113 million Africans (or 5% of the global population) could be forced from their homes by 2050, once again burdening the future of their children. And with them that of the development of an entire continent.