Sudanese Refugee Becomes Head Teacher, Rebuilding Education in Chad

In a refugee camp in eastern Chad, a Sudanese man who arrived with nothing has built and now leads a school serving hundreds of displaced children — organising volunteer teachers, sourcing materials, and navigating the bureaucratic gap between UNHCR education mandates and the reality on the ground. His story is not exceptional; across Chad's camps, refugees have created education infrastructure precisely because the formal aid system chronically underserves the sector.

The structural problem is that education consistently receives the smallest share of humanitarian funding — typically around 3% of the global humanitarian response — despite being the primary determinant of whether a generation of displaced children recovers or is permanently locked out of economic participation. Donors prefer visible emergency interventions (food, shelter, medicine) over slower-payoff investments in schooling. The result is that refugee communities self-organise, creating schools that operate outside formal accreditation systems and whose certificates carry no weight when students cross borders or seek employment.

The question that determines whether this story ends in success or tragedy is accreditation: will Chad's government and UNHCR create a formal recognition pathway for camp-based schools, or will hundreds of thousands of hours of learning by Sudanese children produce credentials that count for nothing when they eventually leave?