A 14-year-old boy named Qasim wakes at 7am in Sanaa, grabs a white sack, and spends his morning collecting plastic bottles. Qasim told Al Jazeera that a full sack earns him enough to help feed his six-member family. His 12-year-old brother Asem takes the afternoon shift. Neither attends school anymore.
Qasim dropped out in the fourth grade. His brother followed later. Now he gazes at his collection sack in a busy Sanaa neighborhood — the sack has replaced the backpack, and no one in his family considers that a tragedy anymore.
Their story is one data point in a catastrophe so large it has become almost abstract. UNICEF reports that millions of school-aged children in Yemen are out of school, with another 1.5 million displaced children at risk of permanent dropout. More than a decade of war between Iran-backed Houthis and the Saudi-backed government has not just destroyed buildings. It has destroyed the belief that education matters.
When Parents Stop Believing in School
The most striking element of Yemen’s education collapse is not the physical damage, severe as it is. It is the cultural shift. Parents who once sacrificed to keep their children in classrooms now see education as a waste of time and money.
Qasim’s father Abdu told reporters he feels no regret about his sons working instead of attending school. He has watched university graduates in Sanaa compete for construction jobs as guards, diggers, and porters — the same work available to anyone without a diploma. Why spend years and money on school when the endpoint is the same?
This reasoning has spread widely. Yemen’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Waed Badhib, has reported that the war had inflicted massive economic losses and driven unemployment above 30 percent. When graduates cannot find work in their fields, the cost-benefit calculation of education collapses for families already on the edge of hunger.
A System With Its Skeleton Broken
Even for families willing to keep children in school, the options are shrinking. More than 2,400 schools across Yemen are destroyed, partially damaged, or repurposed for non-educational uses, according to Save the Children. The Lowy Institute, drawing on broader UN data, puts the figure of schools damaged or rendered unusable at more than 3,400. Either number describes an education system with its skeleton broken.
Classrooms that remain operational are packed. Teachers cannot give individual attention. Quality deteriorates, which in turn gives parents another reason to pull their children out.
The teacher crisis compounds everything. In northern Yemen, where Houthis control territory, public servants including teachers have gone unpaid for years. Hundreds have quit or found other work. Fatima Saleh, a schoolteacher in Sanaa, put it bluntly: “My philosophy is that a hungry, indebted teacher cannot be an inspiration for students.” When the engine of the educational process is dysfunctional, she said, students get minimal learning benefits, lose interest, and start seeking alternatives — and that is how dropouts have kept increasing in the country.
A ceasefire in 2022 largely halted fighting on Yemen’s front lines, but the pause in active combat has not translated into recovery for the education sector. Mohammed Abdu al-Samei pointed to the millions of dropouts as evidence: the calm cannot fix economic problems or improve teacher salaries, and without both, more children will lose access to education. A Save the Children survey found that a majority of students said their sense of safety had not improved since the ceasefire. Violence was cited as a direct cause of dropping out by a significant number of students. The guns may have quieted, but the conditions that push children out of school remain fully operational.
Al-Samei also noted that international aid activities in Yemen have contracted, and required humanitarian funding has not been met. International data indicates education has received a small fraction of humanitarian funding in recent years, a figure that dropped sharply after 2019.
The Long Shadow of Lost Education
Experts inside Yemen interviewed by Al Jazeera are clear about the consequences. Mahmoud al-Bukari, an academic and deputy head of the social affairs labour office in Taiz, warned that parents pulling children from school are creating long-term social and economic problems while sacrificing their children’s futures. Children belong in school rather than in the workforce, regardless of circumstances.
Afrah al-Humaiqani, a sociology professor in Aden, framed the issue as a rights violation. Forcing children into work, she argued, creates anxious personalities focused on earning money rather than learning or playing — children lose the chance to pursue professional aspirations, and the country loses the economic, cultural, and scientific development that an educated generation would produce. She insisted that depriving children of education transcends private family concerns. It is a national issue affecting Yemen’s present and future.
Research from other conflict zones reinforces these warnings. Human Rights Watch has documented how economic pressure and prolonged displacement create compounding barriers to secondary education for Syrian refugee children in Jordan, a pattern strikingly similar to what is unfolding in Yemen. Poverty, early entry into the labor market, and the perceived futility of continued schooling form a self-reinforcing cycle that becomes harder to break with each passing year.
Girls Pay the Steepest Price
The crisis hits girls hardest. Reports indicate that a high percentage of girls in upper secondary years in Yemen are out of school. Child marriage rates remain significant, as families use early marriage to cope with economic pressure. One 16-year-old displaced girl from Taiz, identified as Yousra, was married at 12 and became a mother of two by 13. She studied only through the fifth grade and could not read or write. Yousra described feeling distressed about her situation.
The gender dimension of Yemen’s education collapse matters because it compounds the generational damage. When girls are removed from school at higher rates and married young, the effects ripple through demographics and development indicators for decades.
A Generation Rewriting Its Own Expectations
What makes Yemen’s situation particularly difficult to reverse is that the children themselves have internalized the logic of dropout. Qasim has stopped waiting for the government or aid organizations to help him return to school. His ambition now is to learn a trade — painting, carpentry, or welding. He has moved on.
That shift from a 14-year-old captures the full weight of what has happened. This is not a temporary disruption from which children bounce back when conditions improve. The attitudes have shifted. The cultural expectation that children belong in school has weakened among both parents and children. Rebuilding infrastructure alone will not reverse that.
Yemen’s education crisis is sometimes described as a humanitarian emergency, and it is one. But framing it only in humanitarian terms misses the structural depth of the problem. Schools need to be rebuilt, yes. Teachers need salaries. But families also need to see that education leads somewhere, that a diploma opens a door to something better than collecting bottles at dawn.
With attacks on civilians and children continuing across the broader Middle East, and with Yemen’s economy nowhere near recovery, the incentive structure remains inverted. Education is supposed to be an investment in the future. For millions of Yemeni families, the future is lunch.
UNICEF, Save the Children, and other organizations continue to operate education-in-emergency programs, and public enrollment data from the 2021-22 academic year showed about 7.5 million students still enrolled across various levels. But those numbers coexist with the 3.2 million who are out entirely, and they mask the deterioration in quality for those who remain.
Parents like Abdu need proof, not promises, that school leads to employment. Teachers like Fatima Saleh need paychecks, not praise. And children like Qasim need a reason to believe that a classroom offers something a welding shop cannot. Right now, they don’t have one.
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