The West's Forgotten Crisis: How Sudanese Refugees Are Schooling Themselves in Chad

When a state collapses, the immediate instinct of the international community is to ship tents and grain. Yet the long-term containment of a crisis rarely happens in a food queue. It happens in the dust of eastern Chad, where nearly a million Sudanese have fled the war that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Chad, a nation already grappling with its own severe structural deficits, has absorbed this exodus largely alone. The 2026 Sudan Regional Refugee Response Plan sits at a dismal 17 percent funding level, suggesting donor nations have simply decided that managing this catastrophe is someone else's problem.

In the absence of robust foreign aid, the displaced are left to engineer their own survival. In a camp near Adre, a primary school established in 2024 by Plan International and local partners operates as a fragile bulwark against total social collapse. It is run by Sahra, a refugee and former education administrator from el-Geneina in West Darfur. She oversees 30 teachers and just over a thousand pupils. They operate in two daily shifts, teaching mathematics, science, and languages without electricity, accessible facilities, or even enough benches to keep children off the ground.

The pedagogical challenges alone are steep. Chad’s domestic education system is already on life support, burdened with two million illiterate youths and UNICEF data showing that three-quarters of the country's teachers lack tertiary education. Integrating Sudanese children into this fragile framework requires overcoming significant linguistic and curricular hurdles. Arabic-speaking pupils must suddenly navigate the Chadian syllabus, which refugee educators admit is far more demanding than the Sudanese equivalent. These teachers are pleading for rapid upskilling to manage the transition, yet such resources are practically non-existent in a camp where basic plumbing remains a luxury.

For the parents huddled under tarpaulins, the school serves a purpose far more primal than academic achievement: basic physical security. Unaccompanied minors roaming the camps present a glaring risk, as idle youth without prospects are prime targets for criminal syndicates. While younger children are sometimes kept from class to fetch water or perform casual labour, the total absence of high schools guarantees a lost generation of older teenagers. Abakar Mahamat Nour, an education officer with the Economic and Social Development Agency, views the influx of Sudanese teachers as a rare demographic dividend, noting officially: "Chad and Sudan are like brothers; we share families. Having people like Sahra coming from Sudan to teach our children is a benefit for our country."

Aid workers now go tent to tent, persuading impoverished parents that schooling holds value even in exile. Plan International’s emergency response manager, Kefa Mayange, insists that refugee empowerment is key to stability, stating: "We don’t separate education from child protection. It’s an integrated approach that helps create harmony." This is a highly pragmatic sentiment, but local integration requires capital. Until the glaring 83 percent funding shortfall is addressed, the responsibility of preventing a massive regional security failure rests disproportionately on the shoulders of underpaid, displaced teachers working out of the dirt.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com