By: Victoria Walker, USCRI Policy Analyst
With thanks to Gaspard Atibu, Chairman of the Legal Refugee Center (LRC) and to the LRC Burundi Team for informing this reporting.
LRC is a nonprofit humanitarian organization founded in April 2023 in the United States by a former Burundian refugee. Operating in Burundi, Tanzania, South Africa, and Ghana, LRC is dedicated to protecting the rights and wellbeing of vulnerable refugee populations, including children. Through close collaboration with refugee communities, local authorities, and civil society actors, LRC promotes rights-based protection, dignity, and self-reliance.
Around the world, millions of refugee and displaced children are growing up in crises that receive little global attention, despite facing immense hardship, trauma, and uncertainty.
Burundi is a small country in East Africa bordered by Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The nation has a rich cultural heritage and complex history, but in recent years, Burundi has faced serious displacement and humanitarian crises, both internally and cross-border. Driven by climate shocks, economic hardship, and both political and regional instability, these crises require urgent support.
In places like the Musenyi and Busuma refugee camps in Burundi, children who have fled violence in the DRC are navigating interrupted childhoods marked by displacement, family separation, and limited access to education and essential services. Too often, these communities remain overlooked or willfully ignored by the international community, leaving critical needs underfunded and unheard.
Education Out of Reach
Across the Busuma and Musenyi refugee camps, education represents far more than academic learning for thousands of displaced children: it offers hope, stability, and the possibility of a future beyond life in the camps. Yet, when many refugee children in Busuma and Musenyi awake each day, access to education remains painfully out of reach. Language barriers, shortages of teachers and learning materials, in addition to extreme poverty, trauma, and other lasting effects of displacement continue to deny children in the camps their basic right to education. If these barriers remain unaddressed, countless children will be left without the skills and opportunities needed to rebuild brighter futures for themselves and their communities.
Although over 188,000 refugees from Burundi reside in neighboring countries, Burundi hosts over 113,300 refugees and asylum-seekers itself, predominantly from the DRC. Musenyi was established in 2024 and is located in the southeastern part of Burundi. Busuma was established in 2025 and is in eastern Burundi. Together, they are two of the largest refugee sites in the country. Both camps received large influxes of refugees in 2025 when violence escalated in eastern DRC.
In early 2025, thousands of Congolese refugees sought safety in Burundi in what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) detailed as the largest influx Burundi had experienced in decades. Many of these new arrivals were children, including unaccompanied and separated children (UASC), those arriving without their parents or guardians. Many displaced children fled the DRC after witnessing armed conflict, violence, destruction of their communities, and the loss or separation of family members, experiences that have left deep psychological and emotional trauma. After enduring dangerous journeys to reach safety, many children arrived in Burundi already vulnerable and in urgent need of protection, stability, and psychosocial support.
As the refugee population rapidly expanded, already limited resources in both Musenyi and Busuma became increasingly strained or were never available in the first place, particularly in the child protection and education sectors. Today, both Busuma and Musenyi are over capacity. Musenyi, designed to host around 10,000 people, now hosts over 22,000 refugees with children making up over half of the population. In Busuma, children make up 60 percent of the over 66,700 refugees who live there. This includes over 1,100 UASC. Severe overcrowding and limited resources have left two-thirds of the population in Busuma without shelter. Some shelters consist of merely plastic sheets, leaving refugees, including young children, exposed to rain, heat, and all other elements. Access to clean water, latrines, health and nutrition services, protection services, and education have all become increasingly strained due to overcrowding and decreased funding from the international community. In its April 2026 emergency response update, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported a 100 percent funding gap for education in Burundi. The agency had received no humanitarian funding for education in the country in 2026, including carry-over funds, against a required $722,317 education response budget.
These conditions have had especially devastating consequences for refugee children, whose safety, development, and futures depend on consistent access to protection and education services that remain severely under-resourced.
Learning Amid Trauma and Instability
Refugee children in Burundi are living in both urban and camp settings. All experience barriers to education and serious protection risks. In Busuma and Musenyi refugee camps, the resources available are not enough to keep up with the increasing needs. Children are left without access to quality education due to overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, and inadequate infrastructure. That is if there are schools at all. At current writing, in Busuma, there is no access to formal education systems for the children who live there. The Ministry of Education, UN agencies, and civil society organizations are working to bridge the gap and establish an education response in Busuma, but major funding gaps persist.
LRC Chairman, Gaspard Atibu, conveyed the urgency of the education crisis in Busuma and Musenyi, noting that the lack of education opportunities “not only hampers the cognitive and social development of children but also makes them vulnerable to early marriage, child labor, and psychosocial distress.”
Even when children can access formal schooling, like in Musenyi, many struggle to stay enrolled. Burundi’s primary language, Kirundi, used in public schools can prove to be a significant language barrier for Congolese refugee students. Additionally, certain subjects that students studied in the DRC may not be available in schools in Burundi, so integration can be a challenge.
The situation for many refugee households in Burundi is dire. When families are unable to afford food and other necessities, school fees become a barrier. Access to textbooks and other required school materials is often extremely limited, leaving many children without the tools they need to fully participate in class. For some families, children are forced to miss school altogether to help earn income, care for younger siblings, or support household responsibilities. LRC also noted the increased risks for girls, as they are often kept home while their male siblings are prioritized to receive an education. Girls are also under greater threat of early marriage and teenage pregnancy, and menstruation can also have a serious impact on their school enrollment.
Lastly, as reported to LRC, many of the children in Busuma and Musenyi suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) related to war or exile. Trauma and mental health struggles have had a significant impact on children’s school enrollment, at times leading to depression, severe anxiety, addictive behaviors, and suicidal thoughts.
Education Is a Right, Not a Privilege
Being forced to flee already disrupts a child’s education. In displacement settings, these intersecting barriers place refugee children at heightened risk of falling behind academically, dropping out of school entirely, and becoming more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, child labor, and early marriage, often with minimal protection services available.
Regardless of who they are, what country they came from, what country they sought safety in, or how they got there, refugee children have the same rights as all children. This includes the right to education, as is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
LRC reports that “education is the most urgent and unmet need in both camps, especially in Busuma…” and the organization is working to immediately fill the gaps. As challenges are compounded by widening humanitarian needs in the country, including 632,989 children in need of humanitarian assistance, the capacity of humanitarian actors to deliver key services is strained. Donations to LRC support their work to provide children with school fees, supplies, and learning support, as well as other child protection initiatives.
“I want people to know about the situation of these children in Burundi,” LRC Chairman, Gaspard Atibu, told USCRI. “To know what kind of life they are going through right now and how we can help them to be in a situation where they can feel they are not alone, even in displacement. To see how people can come together and help support them in small or big ways. We need to show our values and support them in school.”
The international community must urgently step up to protect refugee children’s rights, fully fund humanitarian responses, and invest in long-term solutions that prioritize education and protection.
Refugee children are not defined by the crises they survived. They are students, leaders, and future changemakers whose potential should never be limited by displacement. Ensuring their right to education is not simply an obligation; it is an investment in their futures and in stronger, resilient communities for generations to come.
In June, USCRI’s Policy and Advocacy Team will release a report that shines a light on child displacement globally and uplifts the voices of displaced children and youth themselves. To inform this work, we partnered with local organizations, including refugee-led organizations (RLOs), that work directly with displaced children, youth, and their families every day.
A version of this piece with Legal Refugee Center (LRC) will be featured in the forthcoming child-focused report, “Their Future, Their Voice: Centering Displaced Children in Global Protection and Policy,” highlighting a joint call for increasing education access for refugee children.
