His name is Abkar Mohammed and he is nine years old. Every day he carries a kit for cleaning and polishing shoes into the busy streets of Port Sudan, the city on the country’s eastern coast where his family ended up. They came from Khartoum, he, his mother and his three siblings, a few days after the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces broke out on April 15, 2023. His father had died before the fighting started. Now the family rents a home in al-Kasara, one of the city’s poor neighbourhoods.

Abkar does not go to school. The family cannot afford it. In the mornings he studies the Quran at a khalwa, a traditional religious school, and then, as he told Fatima Edam of Al Jazeera, the working day begins: “When my lesson finishes, I pick up my shoe-cleaning equipment and head to busy areas to work. In the evening, I take public transport home, making sure I get back before sunset.”

A pair of shoes cleaned or stitched brings him about 1,000 Sudanese pounds, roughly 11 US cents. By evening he has around 10,000 pounds, about $1.08, and he hands it to his mother. Most of the household’s costs are carried by his 23-year-old brother, who picks up casual work in the markets.

The count

Abkar is one child. UNICEF puts the number like him, school-age children in Sudan who are not in school, at eight million out of 17 million. In Darfur, among the regions the war has hit hardest, about 80 percent of schools were still closed and 70 percent of children were not attending classes.

Save the Children has tried to measure the loss in days. In a release in January, the charity said more than 8 million children had spent about 484 days without entering a classroom, a closure it called among the longest anywhere and 10 percent longer than the roughly 440 days the Philippines lost to Covid-19. Al Jazeera now reports the figure as an average across Sudan’s children. The same analysis, drawing on Global Education Cluster data, counted about 13 million of the 17 million children out of school, a higher figure than UNICEF’s, and found only 3 percent of North Darfur’s more than 1,100 schools open.

Many of the buildings are gone as classrooms. Eva Hinds, UNICEF’s head of advocacy and communication in Sudan, said nearly half of the country’s school buildings no longer serve that purpose because of war damage.

Books in Shikan

The war has also reached the paper. On September 20, drones struck two warehouses in Shikan locality in North Kordofan. According to UNICEF’s statement, the strikes destroyed more than 292,000 textbooks and 40,000 Arabic and mathematics review books, among some 332,000 learning materials meant to go out from October, at the start of the new school year, to schools including those in West Bara, Bara and Um Dam. “The destruction of these learning materials is a setback for children at a time when every effort is being made to get them back into the classroom,” said Angela Kearney, UNICEF’s representative in Sudan.

UNICEF did not say who sent the drones. The RSF has been accused of hitting schools and universities with drone strikes, along with other civilian infrastructure, and Kordofan has become the war’s main front as drone strikes spread. Wars usually count their dead and their territory. This one, as the Shikan warehouses show, also destroys a school year before it can start.

What a classroom protects

Sulaima Ishag, head of the Government Advisory Council for Women and Children, said the children most likely to lose schooling for good are those in conflict zones such as Darfur and parts of Kordofan, and that girls are at particular risk. “[There are] cases of school dropouts and child marriage reported, alongside sexual violence,” she said. Girls, she added, face adolescent pregnancy and heavier domestic duties, which make a return to school less likely.

The absence of schools as safe and protective environments leaves children increasingly vulnerable to a range of threats, including child labour, early marriage, recruitment and use by armed groups, exploitation, sexual violence, trafficking and family separation.

Hinds described children who have fled several times, each move separating them again from teachers and classmates and often leaving them with no books and nowhere safe to study. The longer they stay out, she warned, the harder it is to catch up, and the risk is a generation unable to help the country rebuild. The psychologist Hanaa Mohamed said many children live in constant fear, sleep badly and cannot concentrate. “These pressures have also led to changes in behaviour, including increased aggression or social withdrawal,” she said.

Children who earn

The war has set Sudan’s economy back 30 years, and 60 percent of Sudanese now live in poverty. Displaced families arrive in towns and camps where they know almost no one, sometimes with only the clothes they are wearing. There is little work for adults, so parents depend on what their children can bring home.

Saliha Omer sells tea on a street in Port Sudan. Her 11-year-old son works in a grocery shop. “I couldn’t enrol him because of our financial circumstances after we were displaced,” she said. She plans to return to Khartoum in the coming days so that he can go back to school.

Mahmoud al-Ghali was 13 when the war began. He remembers his last days in class, when he and his classmates sat their end-of-year exams before moving up to intermediate school. That move never happened. He has been displaced several times and is now 16. He reached Al-Fao in December 2023 and sold goods on the street there until he had saved some money, then came to Port Sudan with his uncle in July 2025. For three years he has sold sweets and crisps. He buys them from shopkeepers, pays the traders back at the end of the day and keeps around 20,000 pounds, less than $3.

Living costs keep rising, and he has little hope of going back to school himself. His two younger brothers are in class again, in their village in Gezira State, which the army has retaken. Mahmoud wants to save enough to grow his small business.

“I’ve got used to working because circumstances have left me with little choice,” he said. “I no longer feel as strongly about going back to school as I once did, but I’ll keep trying so my younger brothers can finish their education.”