Back to work, not school: Yemen’s crisis forces children to drop out

Taiz, Yemen – It was around the middle of the morning, and children at a nearby school were preparing for their break. But 11-year-old Hasnaa Jaber was walking through empty farmland on the outskirts of Taiz city, collecting discarded plastic bottles.

Hasnaa lives with her impoverished family in an informal settlement for people displaced by the country’s more than decade-long war . Instead of going to school , she works alongside her family to help make ends meet.

“My dream is to become a teacher. I studied up to the third grade, but then I dropped out of school along with my two older brothers to help my father,” Hasnaa told Al Jazeera.

The new academic year began in government-controlled areas of Yemen on August 30, but Hasnaa and other children from families in difficult financial situations like hers are not in the classroom.

She is one of 3.2 million children who are out of school in Yemen this year, according to an estimate by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). That is an increase on the 1.8 million children UNICEF says were out of school in 2015, during the first year of the war.

Of Hasnaa’s four siblings, only one currently attends school, as she is too young to collect plastic bottles or wash cars – the kind of work the family does.

“My two brothers and I asked my father if we could resume our studies this year,” she said. “He was happy that we wanted to go back to school, but providing basic food for the family remains a major struggle. He promised us that we will go back next year.”

Hasnaa has friends who still attend school, but she feels closest to those who are also out of school, bound by their shared hardship.