Child victims of conflict and violence face barriers to learning

Faquira was just 13 years old when, in 2021, armed Islamic fighters abducted him from a boat in northern Mozambique. He was placed in a makeshift religious school in the bush and told to harden himself to the death he saw around him.

“I learnt a lot about killing, and I saw other children being trained with weapons,” he says. “I didn’t carry a gun, but I was told the Koran said I should not be afraid if people were killed. Over time, I adapted to violence.”

A year later, he was able to escape and return home, where he is looking to make up for his lost education. “I wanted to go back to school and made an effort to catch up,” he says, expressing a wish that he can, one day, become a social worker like the staff who helped him to readapt. “I no longer have nightmares.”

In all parts of the world, temporary school closures and the disruption caused by Covid-19 lockdowns led children to suffer “learning loss” and emotional pressures. But the effects are far greater for those in areas touched by violence, drawn directly into fighting or criminality, and at high risk of being unable to resume their studies.

In many regions experiencing conflict, schools have been closed or destroyed. Even children who have returned home, such as Faquira, face barriers to learning — including stigma — and may feel unwilling to go back to school. As a consequence, they are unlikely to reach their potential, in turn limiting their communities’ future development.

So, in Mozambique today, organisations such as the Fundação para o Desenvolvimento da Comunidade are trying reintegrate children into society after they were drawn into the jihadist insurgency, which began in 2017 and led to the displacement of more than half a million people.

“The biggest challenge today is finger-pointing from community members because the children were part of an armed group. Sometimes, they are rejected, and we have to do quite a lot of work to ensure they are accepted again and get access to services,” says Suale Ussene, one of the caseworkers for the charity, based in the port city of Pemba in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province.

The biggest challenge is finger-pointing from the community at children who were in an armed group

She describes children taken by militants who have been scarred by their experiences and often become aggressive as a result. “Some are scared to say what they lived through.” Some come to school armed with knives. Others, such as Fiema, now aged 12, who is also under Ussene’s care, need psychological support in response to the sexual violence she experienced while held by militants.

The project, supported by funding from Unicef, has helped provide psychosocial support to more than 500 children who were seized by armed groups. But it struggles to make up for mainstream education with so many schools closed by the conflict in the region.

If this type of disruption in Mozambique has been the result of military conflict, in Haiti it is more directly linked to criminality.

Luca Chrislie, president of the charity Organisation des Coeurs pour le Changement des Enfants Démunis d’Haiti, which works with vulnerable children, estimates that four-fifths of the schools in the poorer districts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, are “occupied by armed gangs, vandalised or burnt”.

Despite recent, fragile truces between competing neighbourhood gangs, she says that many children have to navigate rival militias, as well as police, as they move around in search of study or work. The opposing groups fiercely defend their territories.

Cost remains another significant barrier to continued education, given that many of Haiti’s schools are private and charge fees beyond the levels that families can afford. In the limited number of state schools, many families displaced by violence also struggle to gain admittance, because they do not have official identity cards allowing them to enrol.

Chrislie says that the attitudes of children affected by violence also makes education difficult. “They became much more aggressive. They consider that they are bosses and others should respect them. We do our best to offer educational and psychological support. It requires time. They have had violence driven into them, and they anticipate violence from others.”

For Dorismond Pierre Fils, national co-ordinator for the faith-based charity Action Pastorale pour le Développement Humain Haiti, which oversaw a recent vocational training programme for young people, points to other explanations. “If a child is integrated into gangs, it’s because of a lack of professional opportunities. There are so many who want another route in life.”

His group recently concluded six months of training for 90 young people in practical skills that lead to local self-employed jobs — from tiling and construction to heavy-goods-vehicle driving, window installation, beauty salon and petrol-pump work.

But, like Chrislie and their counterparts in Mozambique, he stresses how limited the funding is from government and international organisations to help children catch up on their regular education — let alone provide the extra support for those who were victims of conflict. “The eyes of young people are fixed on us,” he says.