by Nurat Uthman
Human Rights Watch on Monday demanded that Egypt remove “bureaucratic registration barriers” that it says prevent “tens of thousands of refugees and asylum-seeking children” from accessing education in the country.
“The authorities should immediately remove the barriers keeping refugee and asylum-seeking children out of school,” HRW said, adding that international partners should “urgently support humanitarian funding for education for refugees in Egypt.”
As of November, the North African nation hosted 834,000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), a figure that has more than doubled compared with last year because of the conflict in Sudan.
Sudan descended into war in April 2023, pitting the regular military under army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The real number of refugees in Egypt is likely to be higher than the UNHCR-registered total, with the government announcing last month that more than 1.2 million Sudanese refugees have fled their country to Egypt.
UNICEF estimates that there are 246,000 refugee children of school age in Egypt, half of whom were not enrolled in classes as of October.
A recent HRW study found that 9,000 children arrive every month in Egypt, and around half of the recent arrivals were not in school.
These numbers do not include the estimated 100,000 Palestinian refugees who entered Egypt from Gaza over the past year and who do not register with the UNHCR, the study said.
