The Children Left Out of Back-to-School Season

By: Victoria Walker

It is August, and across the United States, “back-to-school” season has begun. New backpacks, fresh notebooks, and the anticipation of a new school year fill stores and classrooms. For millions of children around the world, returning to school is a familiar ritual.

The chance to learn is something worth celebrating. But who gets left out of the back-to-school story? What happens when there is no school to return to?

Far too often, refugee and displaced children are denied the fundamental right to learn. This is the reality facing children arriving at Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Settlement’s reception centers in Kenya, where many spend months, or longer, without access to formal education.

For children in refugee camps, education is more than the absorption of knowledge; it is protection, stability, and sometimes the only sense of normalcy when it seems as though everything has fallen apart. As a policy analyst and child rights advocate, I’ve spent time with children whose education has been disrupted by conflict and displacement. In 2023, and again in 2024, I wrote about the challenges children face in accessing education in Kenya’s Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps and Kalobeyei Settlement. Those challenges have only become more urgent. Today, more than half of Kakuma and Kalobeyei’s 318,825 residents are children. For them, the promise of education remains far from guaranteed.

Even for children who manage to enroll in school in the camps, education often means squeezing into classrooms with more than 100 students for one teacher, and resources stretched to the breaking point. Thousands of other children never enroll at all because families face impossible choices between buying food or paying school fees. Girls in particular face added challenges to enroll and stay in school, including stigma, gender-based violence, and a severe lack of menstrual health resources.

But nowhere is the education gap more glaring than in the reception centers. There, there is no school at all.

Thousands of children are currently waiting in Kakuma and Kalobeyei’s reception centers. Some arrived with their families. Others arrived alone. Many do not know how long they will be waiting there. All have endured difficult journeys, often marked by violence, loss, and experiences that no child should have to face.

Reception centers are designed to be temporary places of safety. They are where newly arrived refugees are registered, where children can be identified by child protection staff, and where families begin receiving the assistance they urgently need as they wait to be moved into the camp. There are no schools in Kakuma and Kalobeyei’s reception centers.

These centers were never intended to become children’s homes. Yet due to funding shortfalls and registration delays, many families now spend weeks, months, and sometimes even years there. For children, that means growing up in limbo. Growing up without a school. Although Child-Friendly Spaces in the centers are striving to provide children with informal education programs, the consistency, knowledge, and dignity of attending regular school like their peers is missing. Those working with children in the centers have repeatedly voiced that prolonged exclusion from school has deepened children’s psychosocial distress and left them vulnerable to child labor and other exploitative practices to support themselves and pass the days. Despite these warnings, funding for refugee education and child protection has continued to decline, leaving organizations with fewer resources even as the number of children in need continues to grow.

“When we work with children, we are reminded that every child has dreams,” says Sylvia Maru, USCRI’s Program Manager in Kakuma. “They want to learn, make friends, discover what they are good at and imagine a future for themselves. For refugee and displaced children, education can provide a sense of stability and belonging at a time when so much of their lives may feel uncertain. We cannot allow displacement to become a reason for a child to lose their opportunity to learn and dream. Every child deserves not only a place in a classroom, but the chance to believe that their future is still possible.”

As we prepare for a new school year, it is worth remembering that for thousands of refugee children, there is no classroom waiting. They are waiting. For children in Kakuma and Kalobeyei’s reception centers, each day without access to school is another day of learning lost, routines disrupted, and futures put on hold.

Every child deserves to walk through a classroom door this back-to-school season. This means ending prolonged periods of waiting without access to school, fully funding humanitarian responses, and ensuring that education and child protection are embedded as priorities in humanitarian policy and action. Displacement should never mean that a child’s education, and the future they are building through it, are put on hold.