CARE International in Sudan: Rapid Assessment of Education Needs, Gaps and Programming Options in Sudan

The conflict that began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has become one of the world's most severe humanitarian and displacement crises, with more than 13 million people displaced by early 2026. Education has experienced an unprecedented national disruption. Estimates range from approximately 8 million children with no access to any form of classroom learning (the operational planning figure) to approximately 19–19.5 million children whose schooling has been disrupted under broader measures. Darfur and Kordofan have experienced the most acute losses of schools, teachers, and administrative records, while the eastern and central states have absorbed successive waves of displaced and, increasingly, returning families. National school reopening increased from 32 percent in April 2025 to approximately 62–65 percent by early to mid-2026. However, a school being open is not the same as a school being ready to receive children. Overcrowding, learning loss, and protection risks continue to compound the human cost.

1.2. Purpose, objectives and scope

The purpose of the assessment is to inform CARE Sudan's decisions on whether, where, and how to engage in the education sector within a funding landscape reshaped by the withdrawal of USAID and the emergence of new multilateral funding opportunities. It aims to identify the principal education needs and gaps, determine which populations and geographic areas are most severely affected and why, and outline the resulting programming options.

The assessment covers all 18 states, prioritized through a state-by-state severity ranking, and is organized around four pillars: access, protection, and inclusion; quality teaching and learning; health, nutrition, and WASH; and system resilience, governance, and capacity. Consistent with the inception report, it presents programming options rather than detailed program designs. Although higher and tertiary education were raised by key informants, they fall outside the assessment's focus on basic and secondary education. Technical and vocational education and training remain in scope and is examined in Section 7.2, section 9.1 and Option 10 as one of the subsectors where national coverage is thinnest.

The assessment is a rapid education needs assessment that combines a structured review of 72 documents with 33 key informant interviews, triangulated against the current quantitative evidence. The 33 informants represent nine stakeholder groups: 9 national NGOs, 6 CARE staff, 4 international NGOs (INGOs), 2 UN agencies, 3 Education Cluster representatives, 2 Local Education Group (LEG) representatives, 3 government representatives, 1 donor representative, and 3 head teachers. Interviews were coded KII-01 to KII-33 and anonymized by role and location. Severity is scored using a consistent five-band scale, ranging from Minimal to Extreme, across all indicators and pillars. Need and coverage indicators are scored by quintile, while response-output indicators are scored using a nil-delivery rule. Findings were triangulated to assess convergence and salience before being reported, and conflicting evidence is explicitly identified rather than reconciled. The principal limitations include the absence of a national teacher headcount, limited donor and health-related evidence, and difficulty accessing the worst-affected areas.

Access is the binding1 emergency, and it is unevenly distributed. Nationally, 12,243 of 19,883 schools have reopened, but state reopening rates range from full reopening in several eastern and central states to 3 percent in North Darfur and 15 percent in West Kordofan. West Kordofan also has the country's highest out-of-school rate, at 88 percent, with no reported reach and no education partner operating in the state. In South Darfur and West Kordofan, the out-of-school caseload exceeds the entire children-in-need caseload, suggesting that the figure used for prioritization understates need in two of the states where needs are greatest.

Quality rests on a workforce that cannot be counted. The Education Cluster teacher headcount is blank for all 18 states, so pupil-teacher ratios cannot be computed anywhere in Sudan, although the Transitional Education Plan records approximately 288,000 teachers for 2022/23 and a state-level count exists for government-controlled areas of South Kordofan. The East Darfur assessment found that 99 percent of schools lacked appropriate materials, while only 7 percent of teachers had early-grade training and 4 percent had psychosocial support training. The loss of national printing capacity during the conflict has also constrained the supply of materials at its source. Teacher pay is the determining factor, alongside a distinct shortage of qualified teaching personnel, and the workforce is now predominantly female.

School WASH and school feeding have broken down nationwide. Across Sudan, 202 schools have a recorded drinking water installation, 55 have a handwashing facility, and 22 have a toilet, out of 19,883 schools. School feeding was absent from all 91 schools included in the East Darfur assessment. This represents the clearest single opening for CARE, which already delivers WASH in eight of the nine states where it operates, while the baseline shows that girls' completion rates are halved where latrines are absent.

Protection, cross-cutting, and policy findings. Gender, disability, child recruitment and labor, gender-based violence, psychosocial distress, and the needs of over-age, nomadic, and pastoralist children cut across every pillar. Several unsettled policy questions also affect recovery, particularly the recognition of accelerated-learning certification across areas of de facto control, curriculum harmonization, refugee inclusion in the national system, and the status of volunteer teachers. The report treats these as coordination questions arising from divided administration rather than as institutional failures.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB