‘No roof, no seats, no desks’: photographing Yemen’s conflict-hit schools

Their classroom has no roof, no seats, no desks; most of the 50 small children sitting on the rubble-strewn floor have no pens or paper. But the students in this makeshift school in Hays, a village in Yemen’s Hodeidah province, are still among the luckiest in the country simply for having a teacher and a place to learn.

Seven years into a catastrophic war that sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s conflict shows no signs of ending soon, and the future of an entire generation is at risk of being destroyed. About 3 million children are unable to attend school, according to the Red Cross, with 8.1 million needing urgent educational assistance.

There is a huge pressure to leave school to work to support the family,” says Yemeni Agence France-Presse photographer, Khaled Ziad, who took the picture in September. “Some children in Yemen are now 10 years old and they’ve never had the chance to enrol in any school. If families don’t have money for food or medicine and hospital fees, how can they afford education expenses?”

The UN has yet to make an official declaration of famine in Yemen because there is not enough reliable data to meet the technical definition. But 16.2 million people – around half the population – are food insecure, and fluctuating pockets of famine-like conditions have left nearly 2.3 million children under the age of five acutely malnourished. Weakened immune systems also make infants susceptible to Yemen’s devastating outbreaks of cholera and dengue fever: most people say Covid-19 is the least of their concerns.

Civil servant salaries in some areas have not been paid in several years, meaning many teachers and doctors effectively continue to work for free. While Yemen has about 170,000 teachers across primary and secondary schools, about two-thirds do not receive regular salaries.