• School resumes in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou.
• However, many classrooms remain empty.
• The region, which borders Mali and Niger, is one of the poorest in Africa.

In Burkina Faso’s Sahel region, which borders Mali and Niger, school started last month.

Even though children returned to school in the capital, Ouagadougou, on October 3, many classrooms remained empty.

“We haven’t resumed classes because we can’t access our workplace,” says a teacher who requested anonymity for his safety. We can only go by convoy or helicopter.

According to the UN, 4,300 schools in the West African state are shuttered due to insecurity.

The Burkinabé government thinks 700,000 children and 20,000 instructors are affected, but many more could be cut off from classrooms when the number of displaced persons in the region passes 1.6 million.

Since 2015, Burkina Faso has been fighting several armed groups – some related to ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda – that have encroached from Mali across the Sahel.

Schools in Mali and Niger have been attacked as the crisis rages. Burkina Faso has more school closures than the other two countries combined, according to the UN.

Burkina Faso and the globe are alarmed by the security risks posed by hundreds of thousands of out-of-school children and the enormity of this violation of children’s basic rights to education.

Yasmine Sherif, director of the UN’s worldwide fund for education in crisis situations, told Al Jazeera, “If you don’t go to school, you’ll have early childhood marriage.” “Boys don’t attend to school, so they’re more likely to be drafted or convinced to join armed groups. Teenage boys are more likely to join armed groups if they don’t have an education or anything to do. It’s a circle of violence.”

Closing schools might remove social support.

“You have a traumatized young population because school isn’t only reading and writing,” Sherif said. “You lose social and emotional skills, school nutrition, water, sanitation, safety”

Fighting between the military, militias, and armed organizations occasionally makes students, parents, and instructors scared to enter classrooms. Some groups have threatened teachers.

Experts claim al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) targets schools because they are a symbol of the state, French, and secular education.

Schools, town halls, and mayor’s offices are generally the first targets, says Héni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED. They offer terrorist organizations precise targets to attack to show they’ve penetrated the area.

Since 2021, ACLED has documented 144 schools targeted in attacks, 87 of them this year.

As schools have closed, Nsaibia said, “fighters’ average ages have gone down”.

In the last year, Ouagadougou has seen two coups, with the new military leaders blaming instability each time.

Both strongmen have failed to stop the seven-year conflict or return children to school.

Nsaibia stated the current direction is downward. Even before the January coup, and even more so after [the] September [coup], the country was inundated by militancy or insurgency. The last coup accelerated this.

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