Displaced children can't wait for peace to return to go to school

Atom Mufrat Laus, a trainee teacher, takes a learner through a lesson at Kalobeyei Settlement Primary and Junior School in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Turkana.  [Mercy Kahenda, Standard]

In late 2013, I watched families arrive at Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp carrying the terrible knowledge that they had become refugees... again.

Many South Sudanese knew Kakuma already. After Sudan’s 2005 peace agreement, refugees had left the camp. Across the region, more than 100,000 returned to southern Sudan in the first years of voluntary repatriation. They went back to rebuild and become citizens of the world’s newest country.

But two years after independence, South Sudan descended into civil war. The road reversed. One man interviewed in Kakuma had lived in the camp for 10 years, returned to Juba and fled back to the same camp. Families like his came through gates they thought they had finally left behind.

Yet within days, parents were asking where they could enrol their children.

I remember meeting a grandfather in Dadaab who had arrived in the camp at 40.  He is now in his seventies, his children grew up there, and his grandchildren know “home” only through stories. The place remembered by older relatives may not exist in any form to which a family can return.

This is what the term “protracted displacement” conceals. At the end of 2025, 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced, which is about one in every 70 people on Earth. Almost seven in 10 refugees had been in exile for at least five years with no immediate solution. In eastern and southern Africa, the median duration of displacement was nearly 16 years. A child can therefore spend most or all of their school years living in displacement.

The wider picture is no less alarming. The 2026 Global Peace Index counts 61 currently active state-based conflicts, the most since World War II. In 2024 and 2025, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack documented at least 8,566 attacks on education, harming more than 10,600 students, teachers and other education personnel.

When conflict and displacement last for years, children cannot spend a significant part of their childhood waiting for an emergency to end before their education resumes. They need the chance to keep learning and progressing throughout displacement.

This is why the theme of this year’s International Day of Peace, ‘Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day’, is so important. The UN Secretary General has said, “Peace is not just made at conference tables, but in classrooms.” I have met the people he is describing. Many would never call themselves peacebuilders. Their children made them so.

Education is not a panacea against war. Countries full of schools have burned. A school that excludes, humiliates or teaches contempt can sharpen the divisions outside its gates. Who is admitted, whose language is respected and how history is taught, all matter.

But safe, inclusive education can help build relationships and understanding. Children learn to listen, test claims against evidence and disagree without treating one another as enemies. Around them, adults learn to solve shared problems.

Investing in peace means ensuring that education can continue through displacement. Governments and donors must plan and finance education with long-term displacement in mind. Displaced children should be included in national education systems wherever possible. Teachers from displaced and host communities should be trained and paid. Schools must be protected, perpetrators of attacks must be held to account, and parents and young people must be given the opportunity to contribute their ideas around how schools are run.

Education must continue through displacement. Investing in education today is also an investment in the conditions in which lasting peace can grow.

Mr Mohamud is a Senior Education Specialist, Education Above All Foundation