Until every child is in school, no one is truly safe

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Until every child is in school, no one in the world can be truly safe

The day war erupts, a child learns a different kind of lesson — which road is safe, which silence means run, how much can be carried and what must be left behind. Somewhere in Sudan or eastern Congo this year, a girl folded that knowledge into a small bag and walked away from a classroom she may never enter again. She did not call it courage. To her, it was simply the morning she had to leave.

This is the quiet bravery that World Refugee Day was made to honour. The 2026 theme, 'Until Everyone Is Safe,' arrives heavy with meaning: We are marking 75 years since the 1951 Refugee Convention, the promise the world made that no one fleeing war should ever face it alone. Refugee Week names the same spirit in a single word — Courage. For a displaced child, courage is not a slogan. It is the conscious decision to begin again, in a new language, an unfamiliar place, and ask the basic childhood question: When can I go back to school?

Seventy-five years on, our answer is still insufficient. By the middle of 2025, around 122 million people had been forced from their homes, roughly one in every 67 people alive. Conflict drives most of it, but climate shocks increasingly do too, turning failed harvests and floods into fresh waves of displacement. The two crises no longer take turns. They compound, and children feel the collision first.

Nowhere is that clearer than Africa, and nowhere is it more overlooked. When the world pictures a refugee, it pictures a border being crossed. But the majority of Africa’s displaced never do so. They are the internally displaced, uprooted inside their own countries, beyond the reach of the headlines and often statistical analysis. Sub-Saharan Africa is now home to 31.7 million internally displaced people, close to 40 per cent of the global total. They are the largest part of this emergency and the part we are most likely to forget.

Behind those millions are classrooms emptying in real time. In Sudan, some 13 million school-age children are now out of school, more than three in four of the country’s children. Across the Central Sahel, conflict has shuttered more than 11,000 schools, and Burkina Faso has a million children locked out of school by insecurity. A displaced child does not merely experience a pause in education. Left unaddressed, she has encountered the end of it.

Here, we have to be honest about who carries the weight. The countries hosting the most displaced people are rarely the richest; far more often, they are among the poorest, absorbing millions while their own schools and budgets are already stretched thin. The Global Compact on Refugees gave this imbalance a hopeful name, “responsibility sharing”, the idea that the world would shoulder the burden together. In 2026, that promise looks increasingly like wishful thinking.

Humanitarian funding has been cut deeply and abruptly, full stop. UNHCR in 2025 needed US$10.6 billion and by mid-year had received barely 23 per cent of it. As much as US$1.4 billion in essential programmes have been frozen or cancelled, and up to 11 million displaced people stand to lose assistance, a gap widened by the dismantling of major donors such as USAID. Education is almost always the first service cut and the last restored. Schools for displaced children are closing today, not because the need has eased, but because the funding has run out.

This should alarm finance ministers as much as humanitarians because the arithmetic is brutal. Africa has the youngest population on earth, the demographic dividend the rest of the world covets. But a dividend is only paid to those who invest. Educate a displaced child, and you gain a teacher, a nurse, a trader, a taxpayer. Deny her a classroom and that potential curdles into cost: A young person reaches adulthood with neither the literacy, skills or a certificate to earn a living, nor safe passage from childhood into anything stable. The damage compounds at every stage, as she never gets to transition from primary into secondary, or from school into work. A child who never enrolls cannot transition at all. She eventually vanishes from the register, and too often from the economy that needs her.

This is what sits beneath one of the most sobering numbers in education today. There are now 273 million children and young people out of school worldwide, and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for the largest share at 39 per cent, more than any other region. Among refugee children, the picture is grimmer still: Almost half of the roughly 12.4 million children of school-going age are not in school at all. Displacement is no longer one factor among many in this crisis. It is fast becoming the decisive one.