“Madame, please, can you stop the armed groups? Can you stop what the gangs are doing to us?”
That plea reflects the harsh reality facing Haitian children, where violence has shattered education, displaced families, and transformed the simple act of attending class into an act of bravery.
While students worldwide return to school, Haiti’s academic year begins once more under the cloud of insecurity, displacement, and deprivation. Children must traverse gang-controlled territories to reach their classrooms, risking crossfire and forced conscription.
Yet amid the violence, schools remain beacons of hope—places where children can learn, reconnect with peers, and dare to envision a future beyond the crisis.
For Etzer, a father of four, internally displaced person, and advocate for displaced communities, returning to class signifies far more than academic attendance.
Having fled their neighborhood due to gang violence, many displaced children are reuniting with friends and rebuilding social connections brutally severed by the conflict.
“Schooling is like therapy for these children,” he says. Yet learning conditions in many areas remain severely challenging.
Children attend class in Delmas, Haiti, as escalating gang conflict disrupts the country’s school system.
Hope and fear
Jasmide, mother of seven-year-old Woodayline, welcomes the reopening of classes. Yet behind that optimism lie acute hardships: hunger, unemployment, insecurity, and the financial burden of education, which disproportionately affects families relying on private institutions.
“We Haitian parents support reopening schools—but not under the sub-human conditions being imposed on us,” she says.
These concerns resonate widely among displaced families and communities terrorized by violence. Everywhere, Narayan says, she hears the same urgent request: to see children attending school safely.
“Above all, we want safety and continuity of education,” she adds.
Deadly insecurity
The crisis is staggering. UNICEF’s latest data for the 2024–2025 school year reveals that over 1,600 schools were affected by insecurity—disrupting education for more than 240,000 children and impacting approximately 7,500 teachers.
Woodayline and Etzer’s four children are among the many for whom a classroom is no longer a given.
A young girl sits in a temporary camp set up for people who have fled their homes due to violence.
In Port-au-Prince, where up to 90 percent of the capital falls under gang control, some schools have closed, become inaccessible, or been destroyed. Others now shelter families with nowhere else to go.
For many children, the danger begins before they even reach the classroom.
“Just yesterday, two young girls were kidnapped on their way to school. It was the day after the school year began,” Narayan recounts.
Such incidents fuel “enormous fear and anxiety” among families, she explains—leading some parents to hesitate before letting their children travel alone.
And the fear does not dissipate once students are seated in class. A child who has been displaced or exposed to violence can hardly concentrate as they once did. Teachers themselves may have fled their neighborhoods or can no longer reach their schools.
Keeping classrooms open
In response, UNICEF is assisting more than 174,000 children this year across the country’s West, Greater North, and Greater South regions.
The efforts range from distributing supplies and facilitating enrollment to establishing safe learning spaces, providing psychosocial support, training teachers to recognize trauma responses, and rehabilitating damaged schools.
UNICEF also runs remedial classes and accelerated learning programs for children out of school for months or even years—serving as a bridge back into the formal system. That support flows through the Ministry of National Education and targets the country’s public schools.
Young Haitian student smiles during a UNICEF spokesperson’s visit to a school in Delmas 45.
‘They were so happy to be there’
At the launch of the school year, Narayan says she was struck by the students’ enthusiasm. “They were so happy to be there.”
Parents want to be able to send them without fear. Teachers want to work under stable conditions. The children simply want to learn, and to feel normal again.
Despite everything, Haitian families and their children cling to an aspiration that is as ordinary as it is defiant: to go to school, to learn, to find their friends again, and to imagine a future for themselves.
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