Children’s Voices in Post-Conflict Education: Insights from a Large-Scale Survey in Tigray, Ethiopia

• In Event: Speaking Back: Voice, Agency, and Participation Amidst Conflict

Proposal

Background | Since 2020, the Tigray region of Ethiopia has experienced a protracted internal conflict that has significantly disrupted children’s access to education. The UNESCO office in Addis Ababa identified the need for a detailed diagnostic of the educational situation of displaced and returning populations in order to support evidence-based interventions for the rehabilitation of educational infrastructure and the restoration of access to quality schooling (UNESCO Addis Ababa, 2023). This need is situated within a broader national context in which Ethiopia, the third largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, shelters more than 1,015,800 refugees, 77 % of whom are women and children primarily from South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (UNHCR, 2025). Within Ethiopia, over 1,9 million people have been displaced (UNHC, 2025), and an estimated 16.5 million children currently require humanitarian assistance (UNICEF, 2023). In Tigray, 1.4 million children have spent at least one full year without schooling (UNICEF, 2022), while nearly 2.3 million children missed close to three years of education due to the combined effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and armed conflict (Save the Children, 2023). Numerous schools were either destroyed, repurposed as shelters, or occupied by military forces, and more than 22,500 teachers have not been remunerated for over two years (Education Cluster Ethiopia, cited in Guesh, 2023). This study responds directly to the partner’s request by documenting the educational experiences of children in conflict-affected areas of Tigray.
Conceptual framework | The study was guided by a scoping review of barriers to education in emergencies (Author & al., submitted 2025), which systematically synthesized 34 studies across diverse contexts of displacement. Using a six-stage methodological framework (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Levac et al., 2010), the review mapped barriers encountered by refugee and internally displaced children, identifying seven recurring categories: economic hardship, psychosocial distress, linguistic obstacles, gender-based constraints, security risks, infrastructural inadequacies, and socio-political or legal restrictions. Stakeholder consultation in Tigray further enriched the framework (Pouliot-Laforte et al., 2025), leading to the formal integration of military-related impediments (e.g., school occupation, child-soldier recruitment) and disability-related environmental barriers (e.g., inaccessible WASH facilities, absence of inclusive pedagogies).
This conceptual grounding was critical for questionnaire development. Each of the 95 survey items was designed to operationalize one or more of these categories into measurable indicators, enabling the systematic capture of children’s lived experiences. For example, items on commuting distance, harassment, and infrastructure assessed security and physical barriers, while questions on caregiving responsibilities and community attitudes addressed gender and socio-cultural dynamics. By translating the scoping review’s thematic synthesis into a structured instrument, the study addressed a key limitation in the literature; namely, the absence of standardized, context-sensitive tools for measuring educational barriers (Burde et al., 2017; Jamaludin et al., 2024).
Methods | Building on the scoping review, we designed a 95-item questionnaire to capture children’s perceptions of obstacles and opportunities related to schooling. Data were collected between June and August 2025 from 3,002 children across multiple districts, using Kobo Toolbox to facilitate reliable and secure data gathering in a fragile context. The sample included more than 1,400 girls, which allowed for a robust gender-disaggregated analysis. KoboToolbox is a mobile-based platform specifically developed for data collection in humanitarian and low-resource settings (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2020). It allows for offline data entry on tablets and smartphones, which is later synchronized to secure servers when internet connectivity becomes available. This feature proved essential in Tigray, where several districts remain difficult to access and connectivity is inconsistent. The platform also enabled real-time monitoring of data collection, reducing transcription errors and ensuring immediate quality checks.
Results | The preliminary findings reveal substantial barriers to education among children in Tigray. A majority of respondents currently live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps (58.5%), and although 74% attended school regularly before the conflict, nearly 95% are no longer enrolled. Among those who dropped out, 41% stopped attending between one and three years ago, while 29% left less than a year ago. Barriers are multifaceted, spanning administrative, institutional, and material dimensions. Over half of the children lack the official documents required for enrollment, and similar proportions reported being denied admission or placed in the wrong grade level. Material deprivation is striking: 94% of families cannot afford basic school supplies, and 75% view schooling as a heavy financial burden.
Security concerns also emerge as a major obstacle. More than half of respondents indicated that checkpoints, roadblocks, or military operations physically hinder access to schools, while 60% reported that ongoing violence in their area disrupts regular attendance. Health and well-being further compound these challenges: 52% stated that hunger consistently undermines their concentration, and 55% reported that displacement-related trauma interferes with their ability to learn. In addition, 72% experience stress or anxiety at the thought of going to school.
Gender-specific factors were also noted, though reported less frequently. A proportion of girls mentioned missing school due to menstrual needs or pressures related to early marriage, further illustrating how social and cultural dynamics intersect with broader structural challenges.
Contribution and Originality | The methodological design, grounded in a systematic scoping review and implemented through a large-scale survey, ensures strong alignment between research questions, data collection, and analysis. The results underscore that post-conflict educational recovery requires attention not only to physical infrastructure but also to psychosocial wellbeing, safety, and gender equity. The contribution of this study lies in its scale and originality: it represents one of the largest child-centered surveys in conflict-affected Ethiopia, and it brings to the forefront children’s own perspectives, which remain underrepresented in both academic research and policy discussions.
The study advances knowledge in two key ways. First, it demonstrates how gender shapes both barriers to schooling and the meanings attributed to education in post-conflict contexts, highlighting the need for gender-sensitive recovery strategies. Second, it shows that children conceptualize education as more than academic attainment: they identify it as a space of resilience, social belonging, and future orientation. By systematically documenting these perspectives, the study responds to the partner’s diagnostic needs while contributing to international scholarship on education in emergencies.

Authors

• Jeanne Benoit, Université du Québec à Montréal, UQAM

• Olivier Arvisais, Université du Québec à Montréal

• Mohamed Amine Mahhou, Université du Québec à Montréal, UQAM