Armed Groups and Ebola Are Stealing Congo's Schooldays While Kinshasa Looks Away

Somewhere in Ituri, a little girl is waiting for a school bell that will not ring. Her classroom may have been emptied by gunfire, or by fear of a deadly virus, or by a headmaster who fled with the rest of the village. Her parents do not know which. They only know that the year is passing and she is not learning.

This is what war and disease look like when they are not on the evening news. They look like empty benches. They look like a generation of Congolese children whose futures are being quietly erased, one missed term at a time.

Let us be precise about what we are looking at. Ituri and Haut-Uélé are not peripheral corners of the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are home to millions of our brothers and sisters, to farming families, to traders, to teachers who still show up with chalk in their pockets and no salary in their bank accounts. Yet in these provinces, education has become collateral damage in at least three overlapping emergencies: a recurring Ebola threat, an insurgency and militia violence that has never been brought under control, and a state whose presence is thin, late and often predatory.

Ebola is not an abstraction here. The 2018 to 2020 outbreak that centered on North Kivu and Ituri infected more than 3,400 people and killed more than 2,200 of them. Every new alert brings the same cruel logic. Schools are closed or emptied. Parents keep children at home. Teachers fear the thermometer at the gate. Hand-washing stations, which should be routine, are often missing or broken. The disease attacks the body, and the paralysis it causes attacks everything else.

Then there is the violence. In Ituri, the Allied Democratic Forces, a group with roots in Uganda and links to the Islamic State's regional branch, have spent years slaughtering villagers with machetes and firearms. The CODECO militia has terrorized communities in Djugu territory. Across both provinces, armed groups have burned schools, abducted teachers and turned classrooms into shelters for the displaced. When a school is attacked, it is not only a building that burns. It is a community's hope.

And here is the question no one in Kinshasa seems eager to answer. Who is protecting these children? Who is paying the teachers? Who is ensuring that a child who survives a massacre can still sit at a desk the following Monday?

The honest answer is that the state has too often been absent, and when present, it has frequently been more interested in extracting than serving. Public funds for education disappear into layers of administrative leakage. Teachers in remote areas wait months for pay. Parents, who already struggle to feed their families, are forced to pay informal school fees that push poorer children out entirely. The Congolese state has collected taxes from these provinces for decades, yet when the bill comes due for schools, clinics and roads, the ledger is always empty.

We must also name the wider war that consumes the eastern DRC. Our Congolese brothers and sisters in North and South Kivu have watched the M23 movement, which the United Nations Group of Experts has repeatedly documented as operating with direct and substantial Rwandan military backing, seize territory and govern through fear. The Group of Experts' reports, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, have described the Rwandan Defence Force operating inside Congolese territory, alongside M23 forces. Satellite imagery has tracked fresh graves at Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali, more than 1,170 since 2021, a record of soldiers buried in silence because the Rwandan state refuses to admit what its army is doing across the border.

This is not a rebellion. It is an invasion, and it is the ruin of every school it touches. Paul Kagame's government likes to speak of stability and development while its soldiers help to deny millions of Congolese children a safe classroom. Rwanda hosts summits, promotes itself as a clean and modern model, and markets gorilla tourism to foreign visitors, all while the bodies pile up across its western border. We have seen this sportswashing before, and we will keep calling it what it is.

Africa's most powerful governments have spent years making speeches about sovereignty. Yet sovereignty means nothing to a schoolgirl whose village is occupied by foreign-backed militias. Sovereignty means nothing to a Congolese parent watching a child walk ten kilometers to a school that may be shelled before the first lesson. Sovereignty is a promise to the people, and it is being broken daily.

So what must change? Let us be concrete, because vague sympathy has never reopened a single classroom.

First, Ebola preparedness and education must be planned as one system, not two competing emergencies. Schools must have functioning water, sanitation and hygiene services, with soap, clean water and trained focal points, so that health alerts do not automatically become education shutdowns. Learning continuity, through radio lessons, mobile teaching and catch-up programs, must be funded from the start, not as an afterthought when children have already lost a year.

Second, the protection of schools must be treated as a legal and military obligation. The UN Security Council should enforce the protection of education in armed conflict, and the African Union must stop hiding behind diplomatic euphemisms. Peacekeepers and national forces must be held accountable when schools are occupied or attacked. Every burned classroom should be logged, investigated and prosecuted.

Third, Kinshasa must stop treating education as charity and start treating it as a constitutional duty. Teachers must be paid on time through transparent digital payroll systems. School funds must be audited and published. Local communities should have the right to monitor how their money is spent. This is the rule of law in its most practical form: the public's money, spent in public view, for public good.

Africa already has proof that better is possible. Botswana built one of the continent's most respected school systems on fiscal discipline, consistent investment and strong institutions. Mauritius has demonstrated that a small island state, committed to education and good governance, can produce a literate and prosperous citizenry. Senegal has shown that peaceful transitions and an independent civil society can deliver real public services when leaders are answerable to voters. None of these countries are perfect, but each proves the principle that will matter most in Ituri and Haut-Uélé: when institutions work and leaders are accountable, children learn.

Civil society, churches, mosques, women's associations and local unions have carried this burden for years. They should be funded directly, audited openly and given a seat at the table when education plans are drawn up. The private sector, too, has a role. Congolese businesses that profit from the region's minerals and markets should contribute to school reconstruction and teacher training, instead of pretending their supply chains have nothing to do with the violence.

Now the question turns to us. Who in our own countries is listening?

To the Congolese government in Kinshasa, we say this: stop waiting for donors to rescue children your budget was supposed to protect. Publish the school funding figures. Pay the teachers. Protect the schools. If you cannot do it, admit it and allow independent oversight.

To the African Union, we say this: your silence is a policy, and the children of Ituri know exactly what it means. Demand that Rwanda withdraw its forces and its proxies from Congolese soil. Demand that the Group of Experts' findings be acted upon, not filed away. Protect the right of every Congolese child to learn without fear.

To the UN Security Council, we say this: you have the tools, the resolutions and the moral authority. Use them. Sanctions, arms embargoes and accountability for commanders must follow the evidence. A permanent member that shields an aggressor is not a neutral party.

And to every African reading this, we say this: do not let the Congo's suffering become another headline that fades by Friday. Share the facts. Call your representatives. Ask your government what it is doing to hold Rwanda accountable and to support education in the eastern DRC. Support the civil society groups and journalists who keep these stories alive when everyone else looks away.

The girl in Ituri is still waiting for that bell. We owe her more than pity. We owe her a government that answers for its failures, an army that stays home, a neighbor that stops invading, and a continent that refuses to accept a lost generation as the price of other people's ambitions.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB