Educational access in Haiti reached a new crisis point in 2023 as gang violence, school occupation by armed groups, and the general insecurity that prevented both students and teachers from safely reaching educational facilities left an estimated 60 percent or more of schools in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area unable to operate normally. The figure represented a catastrophic disruption of educational access for hundreds of thousands of children whose futures were being foreclosed by the security crisis.
Schools in gang-controlled areas faced multiple threats simultaneously: occupation of buildings by armed groups, targeting of students and teachers for kidnapping, and the simple impossibility of conducting education in areas where gunfire was a daily occurrence. Teachers who showed extraordinary courage in continuing to work under dangerous conditions described situations where children arrived in class traumatized and unable to concentrate, where teaching had to stop when shooting started nearby, and where the psychological burden of the environment made meaningful learning nearly impossible even when physical attendance was possible.
The cumulative educational loss for Haitian children who had experienced the 2019 protests, COVID closures, the 2021 earthquake and assassination, and now the 2023 security collapse was assessed as potentially equivalent to three or four years of missed schooling. For the cohort of children who had begun primary school in 2018, the years that should have formed their educational foundation had been characterized by constant disruption.
UNICEF called for the protection of schools as spaces of peace and learning, noting that the deliberate targeting of schools by armed groups violated international humanitarian law. They called for emergency resources to support children’s education including mobile learning programs, teacher training in trauma-informed pedagogy, and specific security measures for educational facilities. The scale of the educational emergency required investment that the humanitarian funding system was not providing.