Education

On May 13, 2023, the singer, poet, and activist Shaden Gardood was killed by a sniper while sitting on the roof of her family’s home in El Obeid. She had spent the previous day posting online about the war and calling for peace. Nine days after her death, Asia Abdelmajid – Sudan’s first professional theatre actress – was killed by random gunfire in Bahri. A report published in late 2024 by the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies and the Sudanese Music Research Center, titled Tears of Guitars and Screams of Museums, documented more than fifty-five artists, musicians, and performers killed since the war began: some by sniper fire and shelling, some through denial of healthcare when hospitals stopped functioning, at least one – the percussionist Kamel Hasan – through torture in detention. The National Museum was looted. Sudan’s national theatres were bombed or turned into military barracks. ...

In rural Sudan, six out of ten people cannot read or write. Among rural women, the figure is closer to seven out of ten. These are not statistics from a century ago. They are from the 2022 Sudan Labor Market Panel Survey, analysed by the Economic Research Forum in 2024 – the most recent serious measurement of a crisis that has been worsening, slowly and largely unnoticed, for decades. The 2023 war accelerated everything. Sudan’s GDP contracted by an estimated 48%. Five million jobs disappeared. School infrastructure across multiple states was damaged or destroyed. The children who were already out of school – and in rural areas, many were – are now further from any educational pathway than they have ever been. ...

There is a development intervention so well-proven, so cost-effective, and so politically straightforward that it is almost surprising more countries have not made it a universal right. It is not a new technology or a complex financial instrument. It is a meal — a hot lunch, served at school, every day. School feeding programmes are among the most extensively studied policies in development economics. The evidence is unambiguous: they increase school enrollment, reduce dropout rates, improve learning outcomes, and disproportionately benefit girls. When designed well — with food sourced from local farmers — they also serve as agricultural subsidy programmes, injecting cash into rural economies while feeding children in urban and peri-urban schools. The return on investment, according to multiple World Food Programme analyses, averages nine dollars for every one dollar spent. ...