Somalia’s Bay Villagers Displaced by Drought Fear a Future Without Education

‘No school, no food’: Drought pushes Bay region children out of class and into Baidoa’s camps

BAIDOA, Somalia — At night in a camp on the edge of this bustling regional capital, Hassan Isaq Sabri counts his children as they file into borrowed huts to sleep. The adults bed down outside. By morning, he will borrow 20 liters of water from neighbors and begin the daylong search for a meal — and for a way to keep his four school-age children from slipping further behind.

“My children had a good education before,” said Hassan, 55, who farmed four hectares in Oflow village until drought stripped his land and killed his herd. “Now they are without education. The school closed, and we are displaced. I fear my children may fall into bad habits.”

Across southern Somalia’s Bay region, the prolonged drought has erased livelihoods and with them the fragile gains many rural families made in sending their children to class. Local leaders say hundreds of children from 11 villages around Goof-gudud Buurey — about 30 kilometers from Baidoa — have been pushed out of school as families fled failing farms and dead livestock for the city’s displacement camps.

Chief Hussein Adan said more than 20 learning centers have closed in the district since the dry spell intensified, affecting at least 300 primary and middle school students. With incomes gone, most parents cannot meet even the most basic school costs.

Hassan is among them. In Baidoa, private schools charge about $10 per child each month — modest by many standards but out of reach for a man now relying on the benevolence of neighbors to feed a family of 13. “Getting food even once a day is difficult,” he said. “Before, the children were well-fed. Now we have nothing.”

His account traces the cascade of loss that has become familiar in Bay. Two failed rainy seasons wiped out the seeds he planted — roughly $350 gone — while 32 goats succumbed to empty pasture and unfamiliar disease. The family cannot afford the roughly 5,000 Somali shillings charged for a barrel of water from a nearby private borehole. The dream that his children would “go further” than he did has, for now, given way to a daily calculus of food, water and shelter.

The setbacks extend beyond Oflow. In nearby Arag village, Ali Malin Hasan watched the school gates shut in December as families scattered and teachers left. His five children, once reliable top performers, have not sat in a classroom since.

“People fled the village, and the teachers left. The school simply closed,” Ali said. He had managed to pay a combined $30 in monthly fees back home. Now, in El-bay 1 camp outside Baidoa, the nearest private schools cost around $50 a month — a sum that looks impossible as the family scrapes by on roughly a kilogram of food a day, most of it secured by his wife begging in the city. “They feel discouraged when they see other children their age going to school,” he said.

Ali’s three-hectare plot once produced maize, beans, sorghum, sesame, tomatoes and peppers. Last April, drought and pests shriveled everything. The $400 he had borrowed for seeds and inputs vanished with the failed harvest. By December, after exhausting their last stored grain, the family left for Baidoa hoping at least for steady food and some form of schooling. Instead, they found both scarcer than expected.

In El-bay camp, where the shrubs and dust give way to sprawling sheets of tarpaulin and stick-built shelters, the needs list is long. Chairman Mohamed Aadan Ibrahim said nearly 500 newly arrived families with school-age children have been registered since December. None of those children has access to a school inside the camp; most parents cannot pay for places outside it.

“Families are facing water shortages, hunger, lack of shelter, and poor health,” Ibrahim said. “We have no capacity to change their situation. We appeal to aid agencies and authorities to respond.”

The loss of education is more than a temporary disruption. Parents and camp leaders worry about a slide that deepens with each month out of class: children forgetting lessons, adolescents drifting into hazardous work, girls taking on heavier domestic burdens or being married early, boys drawn to street life. For families who fought to get their children into school — often the first generation to do so — the setback cuts especially deep.

In and around Baidoa, the barriers fall into a few stark categories:

• School closures: More than 20 learning centers have shut in Goof-gudud Buurey as drought displaced families and teachers.
• Costs: Fees that once seemed manageable in the villages — $10 per child in Baidoa or $50 for nearby private schools — are impossible with no income.
• Hunger: Many families report skipping meals or getting by on a single daily portion; class attendance is untenable on an empty stomach.
• Water and shelter: With barrels of water costing around 5,000 Somali shillings and shelter scarce, education falls behind basic survival.

For Hassan, the most painful moments arrive at dawn, when he sees other children set out in neat uniforms while his stay behind. He has scoured Baidoa for casual labor — digging, hauling, any day job that might cover a month’s fees — but says opportunities have dried up as more people turn to the same work.

“All our sources of income are gone,” he said. “This is the hardest life we have ever faced.”

In the camps, parents trade tips on any help that might keep learning alive: a volunteer teacher, a donated slate, a promise of future fee waivers. The talk often turns to timing. If the rains return, if the next planting takes, if livestock can be restocked, perhaps the schools in the villages will reopen and the children can pick up where they left off. For now, those ifs sit beside harsh daily facts.

Ali tries to keep his children’s minds engaged. They recite lessons from memory and practice writing in the dust, but he knows the gap is widening. “They were doing well,” he said. “I worry they will forget.”

The situation in Bay is a stark measure of how climate shocks unravel hard-won social gains long before policymakers tally crop losses. When a school gate shuts, families watch a future close with it. In Baidoa’s camps, that reality arrives not as an abstract crisis but as the small, unremarked moments of a morning: the light backpack slung over a stranger’s shoulder, the bell they can hear but cannot answer.

Parents and camp administrators say the answer is not complicated: low-cost, near-camp learning spaces; fee waivers or stipends for the poorest families; and support to stabilize water, shelter and food. Without those, the longer-term costs — to children, to communities and to a region already on the front line of climate-driven disruption — will be far higher than a month’s fees.

Until then, Hassan measures progress in cups of water and shared meals, and in his children’s fading notebooks. “I had hoped they would reach a higher level than me,” he said. “I still hope. But first, we must survive today.”

By Ali Musa

Axadle Times international–Monitoring.