When war broke out in Sudan, schools and universities across the country shut down causing an educational crisis that affected some 19 million children.
Sudanese students, who mostly came to Egypt after the war in Sudan, line up to sing the national anthem in front of a Sudanese flag at their school in Cairo, Egypt in April 2024. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
This article was produced out of News Decoder’s school partnership program. Dan AbdelBasit is a student at African Leadership Academy in South Africa, a News Decoder partner institution. Learn more about how News Decoder can work with your school.
As a child, I grew up believing that the praise I received for academic achievement was ordinary. Good grades were expected. Discipline was normal. Education felt permanent, like something no one could take away. I only understood its value after I lost it.
When war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, schools and universities across the country shut down almost overnight. Classrooms emptied. Lecture halls closed. Students who had been preparing for exams suddenly found themselves preparing to flee their homes.
What once structured our days, timetables, assignments, morning assemblies, disappeared.
For millions of Sudanese youth, education did not simply pause. It collapsed. According to UNICEF, more than 19 million children in Sudan were out of school as the conflict spread, making it one of the world’s largest education crises. But statistics fail to capture what that loss meant emotionally. School had been more than instruction.
It was routine, community, ambition and identity. Without it, days stretched without structure. Goals felt suspended. The future became abstract.
School becomes a struggle.
My own family fled to Egypt and I quickly felt how fragile education could become. I entered a school that felt completely unfamiliar. The structure was different, the teaching style was different and the expectations were different.
I quickly learned that I would have to sit for my international assessment exams a year earlier than planned, which left me feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. What should have been a normal academic transition became a race against time.
In the classroom, I struggled to follow lessons. The way subjects were taught did not match what I was used to and I found myself falling behind. To keep up, I needed extra tutoring outside of school, which meant more time, more stress and more money.
Learning stopped feeling effortless and instead felt like something I was constantly struggling to keep up with. Beyond academics, fitting in socially was just as difficult. As a Sudanese student in an Egyptian school, I often felt like an outsider. My accent, my background and even my way of speaking made me stand out.
There were moments when I felt excluded or treated differently, not because of who I was, but because of where I came from. Xenophobia, in this sense, was not always loud or violent; it was subtle, quiet and isolating.
An investment in an uncertain future
These challenges were also reflected in how I was treated by the school’s administration. Being Sudanese often meant facing more scrutiny, more paperwork and more barriers than local students. Simple processes felt harder, slower and less welcoming, reinforcing the idea that I did not fully belong.
At home, the pressure was just as heavy. My parents were paying for my tuition, my brother’s tuition and expensive examination fees, all while rebuilding their lives in a new country.
Because displaced students were treated as “foreign,” school fees and exam costs were significantly higher, which placed a financial strain on my family. I felt the weight of their sacrifice, which made me fear failure even more. Education no longer felt like just my responsibility, but rather my family’s investment in an uncertain future.
My experience is not unique. According to global organizations such as the UN Refugee Agency and UNESCO, millions of displaced children and adolescents worldwide face disrupted education due to conflict, displacement and legal barriers.
Many are placed in new school systems without adequate support and in some countries displaced students are treated as foreign students, which often means higher tuition fees and fewer opportunities. These structural challenges mean that access to education frequently depends more on status and resources than on ability or motivation.
Education as privilege
Dr. Amin Diab, a psychiatrist working closely with Sudanese youth after the war began, describes the psychological consequences as severe.
“The war in Sudan has not only disrupted lives, but actively obstructed futures,” he said.
Many students experienced depression, anxiety and a loss of motivation after months confined to their homes. The abrupt removal of educational structure left young people feeling directionless.
When routine collapses, so does certainty. For some students, survival replaced ambition. Families displaced by violence needed income.
Teenagers who had once studied for exams now worked in supermarkets, cafés or small shops to help sustain their households. Others remained indoors, isolated from peers, waiting for a reopening that never came. Education had once been the path forward. Now it felt like a privilege reserved for the lucky.
Yet not all young people responded in the same way.
“Mentality and acceptance were the one thin line that separated failure and success for the lives of those displaced young Sudanese people,” Diab said.
What resilience demands
Trauma does not produce a single outcome. While some students withdrew under the weight of uncertainty, others redirected their frustration into determination. It is easy to speak about resilience in abstract terms. It is harder to witness what it demands.
My cousin understands that demand intimately. When armed conflict intensified near their neighborhood, his father was killed in an attack close to their home. Within days, he and his siblings fled Sudan for Egypt, carrying with them their grief, uncertainty and whatever belongings they could gather.
Displacement rearranged everything; their home, their finances, their sense of security. But almost immediately, one question took priority: how do we continue our education? It would have been understandable to pause. To surrender to exhaustion. To let trauma consume focus. Instead, they searched for schools.
They researched scholarship opportunities. They navigated unfamiliar systems. They studied under conditions far from stable. Today, all of his siblings are pursuing their education on full scholarships — completing high school and university degrees despite the circumstances that could have easily ended those trajectories.
When I asked him how he was able to concentrate on school after losing his father, he did not mention resilience. He did not mention strength. He mentioned responsibility.
His father had valued reading deeply. Books filled their home. Education was not simply a means to employment; it was a measure of character and growth. Continuing school became, for my cousin, a way of preserving that legacy. Grief did not disappear. It coexisted with ambition.
War magnifies disparities.
In honoring his father’s love for learning, my cousin began writing. He now publishes stories and articles online, working with other young writers who share similar passions. Education transformed from obligation into purpose. It became remembrance. It became resistance.
His story complicates the narrative often told about war and youth, that disruption automatically results in collapse. But it also reveals inequality. Not every Sudanese student has access to scholarships. Not every family can relocate. Not every young person has the psychological support required to channel trauma into motivation.
Diab emphasized that resilience is rarely one individual, alone. Community, mentorship, financial access, these factors shape who is able to continue and who is left behind.
War magnifies disparities. Those with access to resources find alternative pathways: sitting for national exams abroad, enrolling in Egyptian schools, self-studying with minimal tutoring to reduce costs, competing fiercely for international scholarships. Others remain suspended, waiting for institutions in Sudan to reopen, uncertain whether their academic progress can be restored.
The consequences are not only personal but national. Interrupted education risks long-term economic and social hindrance. A generation delayed is a generation whose potential is constrained.
Fighting for one’s future
And yet, within that unpredictability, something else has emerged: a sharper awareness of education’s fragility. Before the war, achievement felt expected. Now it feels earned. Before the war, school was routine. Now it is contested.
I think back to the years when praise for good grades felt ordinary. I never questioned why achievement was celebrated. I never imagined education could vanish. Now I understand.
Education is celebrated because it is not guaranteed. For Sudanese youth today, including myself, learning is no longer passive. It is intentional. It is pursued across borders, across grief, across instability. It demands sacrifice, financial, emotional, psychological.
War closed classrooms. It dismantled systems. It displaced millions. But it did not erase ambition. If anything, it exposed how deeply young people are willing to fight for the right to imagine a future.
And perhaps that is what remains most powerful: even when buildings collapse and timetables disappear, the desire to learn persists — not as routine, but as resistance.
Questions to consider:
1. How did war in Sudan affect the young people who lived there?
2. In what ways was school a struggle for the displaced Sudanese students in Egypt?
3. In what ways do you think you might have taken your own education for granted?
Dan AbdelBasit is a 17-year-old Sudanese student at the African Leadership Academy interested in storytelling, global issues and how education, migration and identity shape young people’s lives.