In CP, “I was the third in the class”, proudly tells the girl to AFP in her house in the village of Ed Moussa, in the eastern state of Kassala.
Two years later, she even managed to rise to first place despite the difficult learning conditions, between cracked walls, rickety tables and toilets often deprived of water at her school.
But in the middle of CE2, she had to stop everything.
“My father didn’t have enough money so he took me out of school,” she explains, annoyed.
In Sudan, seven million children do not go to school, particularly in rural areas where nearly two thirds of the 45 million inhabitants live, a “catastrophe for an entire generation”, say NGOs.
Already during the 30 years of dictatorship of Omar el-Bashir, deposed following a popular protest movement in 2019, families withdrew their children from school to cope with the economic crisis.
The political and economic slump born of a putsch a year ago, the recurrent ethnic conflicts and the prolonged closures of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic have only aggravated the situation in this country, the one of the poorest in the world.
And every year, torrential rains destroy schools: this summer, 600 establishments were damaged.
Result: Sudan and its 12.4 million students come second among countries with the most fragile school system, according to the Risk Education Index ranking.
“At the age of 10, seven out of ten children are unable to read and understand a simple sentence,” laments Arshad Malik, director of the NGO Save the Children in Sudan.
A symbol of the distress that is even affecting teachers, they regularly demonstrate to demand better salaries or denounce a military power incapable of raising the country.
– No meals, no school –
Zahra knows it, she will only go back “to school if we find the money to pay for meals and school books”.
In the village next to his, in Wad Charifaï, the school canteens closed two years ago when they often provided the only meal a day for children, made of lentils, vegetables and biscuits.
Since these free meals disappeared, Othmane Aboubakr, a daily worker, had to take seven of his nine children out of school.
Unable to pay for meals in addition to transport and school supplies, he chose another option: to put the older workers to work.
“Now children can help bring money home,” he says.
Abdallah Ibrahim also sends several of his seven children to work.
Some help him in his café, while others have found jobs in a bakery.
“Making the children work is not good but we have to, at least to pay for their meals every day,” says Ohaj Souleïmane, a 43-year-old day laborer.
But not all children are equal when it comes to dropping out of school, says Mr. Malik of Save the Children.
“A family will be more likely to withdraw its daughters from school to marry them off or involve them in domestic chores,” he explains.
According to him, four out of 10 girls have left school compared to three out of 10 boys.
Without action to get them back to school, “poverty and inequality are likely to worsen and with them the vulnerability of families to climate change and natural disasters”, warns Mr. Malik.
And this in a country where, according to the UN, a third of the inhabitants are already suffering from hunger.
