UNICEF and Haitian education authorities reported in 2022 that approximately 60 percent of schools in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area were unable to operate normally due to gang violence, school occupation by armed groups, and the general insecurity that prevented both students and teachers from safely reaching educational facilities. The figure represented a catastrophic disruption of educational access for hundreds of thousands of children.
In the most severely affected neighborhoods, schools had been physically occupied by gang networks that used school buildings as bases, storage facilities, or simply as shelter for displaced community members associated with the gang. A school building in gang hands was not just unavailable for education but was actively converted into an infrastructure of criminal governance.
Even schools not directly occupied by gangs were affected by proximity to conflict zones, by the unwillingness of parents to send children through dangerous streets, by teachers unable to reach their schools safely, and by the general anxiety that made concentrating on learning nearly impossible for children experiencing chronic stress and trauma.
The learning loss accumulated over years of disruption — the political crisis of 2019, COVID school closures, the 2021 earthquake in the south, and now the 2022 security collapse — was reaching proportions that educationists described as a generational catastrophe. Children who had missed years of schooling were falling so far behind standard educational trajectories that catching up would require sustained investment in remedial education that was nowhere on the horizon.