Children forced out of school by Yemen's war join informal labour force

ADEN -- Thirteen-year-old Jalal Nasser recently dropped out of school to sell qat alongside his father -- one of a number of his classmates who have left their education behind to make money on the streets.

"There is no benefit from education amid the war," said Jalal's father, Nasser al-Matari. "University graduates are on the street without a job."

But some Yemeni youth -- among them 10-year-old Salam Khaled, who was displaced with his family from Taez and is working at a Sanaa car wash -- still hold out hope of returning to the classroom.

Salam said he works to help get some of the needs of his family.

But he hopes the war will stop so he can return to school and complete his education.

Close to 4.5 million children in Yemen are deprived of education, according to a June report issued by Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations (UN) global education fund.

A much larger cohort of children -- 7.9 million in total -- have been affected by the crisis in Yemen, the report said.

Yemen ranks seventh among 45 countries around the world in terms of the number of children affected by crises and in need of educational support, it said.

Destroying the education process

The school drop-out rate has risen significantly amid the war that has been raging in Yemen since 2015, Deputy Minister of Education Ali al-Abab said in a recent interview with the press.

Since the Houthis seized control of Sanaa, he said, they have worked to destroy the education process in a systematic and complete manner.

The group cut the salaries of public school teachers, sparking an exodus of teachers from the schools, and imposed large tuition costs on students, which was a major contributing factor to the drop-out rate, he said.

In areas that remain under government control, the Ministry of Education is making great efforts to provide education to the children of families displaced from Houthi-controlled areas, he said.

Childhood in Yemen was already difficult, Deputy Minister of Justice Faisal al-Majeedi told Al-Mashareq, but then the Houthis came "to deepen and strengthen measures that harm children and education in general".

"The Houthis replaced schools with barricades," he said, and the number of school drop-outs has risen to more than seven million.

Al-Majeedi accused the Houthis of "glorifying death" for this segment of the population, "increasing their desire to drop out of schools and carry a rifle".

The Houthis also stifled livelihoods by appropriating public institutions, thus making battlefields "the easy way to make a living for students", whom the group encouraged to enroll in its training camps.

The Houthis recruited more than 50,000 child soldiers into their ranks, according to an estimate by the Mayyun organisation.

"They tightened their control over schools, stripped them of their essence and educational role, and turned them into a tool to serve their goals by mobilising students to join the camps," economist Abdul Aziz Thabet said.

He said the Houthis "complicated matters for teachers and cracked down on them to force them to leave the schools".

"Meanwhile, teachers and enrollees in the group's sectarian schools and summer camps are provided with all means of support and aid, including food baskets."

Forced to leave school

There are economic and social reasons for the high number of drop-outs and those affected by the circumstances of the war, researcher Nawal Abdul Rahman of Sanaa University's Population Studies Centre told Al-Mashareq.

Some parents whose salaries were suspended "cannot afford school costs, including registration fees, textbook fees" and transportation costs, she said.

Socially, she said, many families have been displaced by the war, a direct consequence of which is students dropping out of school, as well as the disintegration of the family.

Under these circumstances, she added, parents and students have been forced to find employment where they can in order to eke out a living.