Textbooks cause as much excitement as comics!

New to school

Somali school children flip through paperback books with as much excitement as if they were the very latest comics. The pages, however, are covered with maths, science formulas and handwriting exercises.

As in most parts of the world, schools recently reopened their doors in Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya.

The difference here is that many of the pupils are new arrivals who have travelled from Somalia with their families looking for safety and asylum. Most of them are not even familiar with education in schools.

UNICEF has been helping children to go to school across the Horn of Africa - some for the first time. UNICEF has been supplying school books, providing tents to act as make-shift classrooms in rapidly expanding refugee camps, and helping children who have never been to school catch up with their peers. In Somalia alone, UNICEF is helping 300,000 displaced children go to school.

A chance of a new life

"We normally get children who do not know what education is. They only know about fighting and conflict,” says Ahmed Hassan, headteacher of a school in a Dadaab refugee camp. “So many of them do not know what a school is. They do not know what a teacher is."

In refugee camps, schools become accessible to girls and other vulnerable children who may have never stepped inside a classroom before.

One of the newly arrived children is 15 years old Nur, who came to Dadaab having trekked from Somalia with a cousin. His father died in the war and he does not know where his mother is.

He now lives in a little house made of a few branches tied together on the barren windy plains.

Accelerated learning

Since his arrival, Nur has been determined to get an education and has been preparing himself in a UNICEF-supported accelerated education programme designed to fast-track new arrivals into the mainstream classrooms.

"All I want to do is learn. Maybe in the future I can become a teacher,” Nur says.

The accelerated education programme is very important for these refugees. It helps them overcome many challenges in getting an education, such as language differences.

At Nur's primary school the student-teacher ratio is 168 to 1. With a whopping 4,036 pupils and just 25 classrooms, many children are forced to learn outside in the heat and dust. UNICEF has erected tents to cope with the increasing enrollment and has provided books and basic education materials to help the children learn.

Much more than classes

At the refugee camp schools, the children are fed and are given a safe and protective child-friendly environment. These schools mean so much to these displaced children, who can play with their peers and escape the horror of their past months, filled with hunger, horror, long journeys from their homes, and loss.

Schools also play an important role in delivering life-saving messages on nutrition, hygiene and health education - all of which are essential in the Horn of Africa today.

“Children went through very difficult times to arrive here,” says UNICEF Kenya’s Chief of Education and Young People, Suguru Mizunoya. “Here is the place where their new life starts.”