Thirty million children are not attending school in Arab states. In territories affected by conflict, artists, teachers, and community organizations are attempting to rebuild what bombs have destroyed: not only buildings, but routines, shared narratives, an idea of the future. These programs work, but they survive on emergency funding that was never designed to last.

The essentials

  • Nearly 30 million children are out of school in Arab states, according to UNESCO, with an educational crisis affecting at least fifteen countries in the region, according to UNESCO.
  • Artistic education programs in crisis zones fulfill a function that standard humanitarian aid does not cover: restoring the psychological and social continuity of learning.
  • Actors like UNRWA, Première Urgence Internationale, and local initiatives led by displaced artists and teachers are experimenting with hybrid formats, between creative expression and formal education.
  • Humanitarian funding is structurally short-term: it finances emergencies, not sustainable reconstruction of educational systems.
  • The question for the next decade is whether these programs can scale to an institutional level without losing what makes them effective.

Thirty million children out of school: what this figure really means

Thirty million. The UNESCO figure covers Arab states as a whole, from the Palestinian Territories to Yemen, from Syria to Libya. It designates children who are completely out of school. It says nothing about those nominally enrolled but learning almost nothing, because their teacher has fled, because the school has relocated three times, because a bombing interrupted the school year in November.

These figures mask the granularity of the disaster. In Yemen, more than a decade of civil war has destroyed or damaged thousands of schools. In Syria, the conflict began when children who were ten years old in 2011 are now twenty-five, an entire generation whose schooling has been fragmented, displaced, or interrupted. In the Palestinian Territories, strikes on Gaza hit UNRWA-managed schools that also served as shelters for displaced families: the same building functioned simultaneously as a classroom and a place of survival.

UNESCO, in its rapid assessment of April 2026, documents the precise mechanisms of this disintegration. Conflicts do not only act by destroying physical infrastructure. They disorganize the teaching profession, drive out the best-trained teachers, interrupt supply chains for textbooks, and redirect public budgets toward defense. The result is systemic collapse, not a series of isolated incidents.

What makes this situation particularly difficult to correct is that losses accumulate over time. A child who loses two years of schooling at age nine does not simply recover those two years later: he arrives at adolescence with fundamental gaps that complicate every subsequent learning. At the level of a cohort, this translates into degraded literacy rates for decades.

The limits of standard humanitarian aid

The humanitarian response to the educational crisis has been structured around a few tools: “temporary learning spaces,” substitute schools in tents or requisitioned buildings, programs of quickly trained community teachers. These measures have a logic: maintaining minimum school continuity when national systems collapse.

But they do not address what happens inside children.

Research accumulated since the crises of the 1990s shows that children exposed to prolonged conflict develop stress responses that directly affect their capacity to learn. Hyperactivated vigilance, difficulty concentrating, mistrust of adults representing authority: these survival mechanisms are functional in a context of danger and dysfunctional in a classroom. A child who has not recovered a minimal sense of safety cannot concentrate on fractions or grammar.

This is precisely where arts education programs intervene, and this is why their role in crisis zones cannot be reduced to a luxury or a cultural supplement. They do not teach art for art’s sake. They reconstruct the psychological and social conditions that make learning possible.

A choir that rehearses three times a week in a displaced persons camp constitutes a structure, a calendar, a reason to wake at fixed hours, a collective experience. A drawing or theater workshop creates a space where children can express what they have lived without having to formulate it verbally, a stage that trauma narrative therapy cannot always cross directly. Cultural transmission, stories, traditional music, puppet theater that organizations like Clowns Without Borders and their Arabic-speaking equivalents practice in camps looks like entertainment from the outside and acts as restoration from within.

The actors doing the work: artists, displaced teachers, hybrid organizations

It would be convenient to present this work as a coordinated and well-funded effort. The reality is more fragmented, and often more convincing precisely because it is.

These are Syrian teachers displaced to Jordan who have built, in the margins of an international aid program, calligraphy workshops where children learn to write by copying poems. Palestinian artists who continue to teach dabke, traditional dance, under conditions that defy comprehension. In Lebanon, several initiatives work to document Middle Eastern musical heritage and use it as pedagogical material in refugee communities.

UNRWA, despite budget cuts that have weakened its operations since 2018, maintains in its schools artistic expression programs that rely on local Palestinian teachers. The logic is explicit: these teachers are not merely skill transmitters, they are members of the same cultural community as their students. The art they teach is not neutral: it carries a memory, references, a collective identity that displacement and war seek precisely to erase.

UNESCO, in its global framework for cultural and arts education of 2024, formalizes what these practitioners have been experimenting with for a long time: the arts are not a separate domain of education but a vector of cognitive, emotional, and social development. In crisis contexts, this vector becomes particularly valuable because it can function without heavy infrastructure, with minimal resources, in informal spaces.

These programs can be used for purposes of national propaganda, and some states in the region have done or are doing so. The teaching of exclusive national narratives, the glorification of armed resistance as the only form of worthy identity, the refusal to represent minority histories: these distortions are real. What prevents them, according to the most serious practitioners in the sector, is the plurality of actors, the presence of international organizations capable of counterbalancing dominant narratives, and the anchoring of programs in the communities themselves rather than in state agendas.

The tyranny of the short humanitarian funding cycle

Here lies the true structural constraint. The programs described above exist. Some function remarkably well. But they almost all live under the regime of emergency funding, which operates in short cycles, generally six months to one year, and which responds to criteria of immediate efficiency.

For a humanitarian donor, it is easier to justify food distribution than to fund a theater program over three years. Distributed food can be counted, photographed, audited. The effects of an artistic program on the psychological resilience of a cohort of children are poorly measured at six months, better measured at five years, and truly read in schooling and social cohesion data at ten years. The timeline of results is incompatible with the timeline of funding cycles.

This mechanism produces a perverse consequence: the best programs, those that have had time to take root in a community, to train their trainers, to build trust with families, are the most vulnerable to budget cuts. Because they have lasted long enough to move beyond the emergency phase, they fall outside the criteria of humanitarian aid. Because they operate in conflict zones, they also do not meet the criteria of long-term development.

This fracture between emergency and development is not unique to the cultural sector. It structures all international aid policy, with documented effects across all sectors. But it hits arts education particularly hard, whose effects are by nature cumulative and deferred.

Available data and its current limitations

Evidence establishing the effectiveness of artistic programs in crisis contexts exists, but remains incomplete. Studies conducted in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon have documented significant improvements in psychological well-being indicators among children participating in creative expression programs. Pilot programs in Yemen and Iraq have observed a correlation between participation in school artistic activities and reduced absenteeism.

This data does not yet allow rigorous measurement of long-term effects on educational trajectories and intergenerational social cohesion. Longitudinal studies in active conflict zones are extremely difficult to conduct: populations move, conditions change, researchers lack access. Available results often come from relatively stabilized contexts, such as refugee camps in Jordan, and their generalizability to active conflict zones remains to be established.

This is a real limitation. It does not justify waiting for perfect evidence to act. The mechanisms are sufficiently well understood: the routine structure that artistic activities provide, the space for expression they create, the identity transmission they enable. The uncertainty concerns the magnitude of effects, not their direction.

Jordan perhaps offers the best available observation ground: a country that has hosted a substantial Syrian refugee population since 2011, with double-shift educational programs in public schools and a relatively active cultural organizations ecosystem. The first cohorts of children who participated in artistic programs upon arrival are now reaching adulthood. Their trajectories, if systematically documented, could provide solid evidentiary data.

Moving from experimentation to institution

The challenge for the next ten to fifteen years is not to convince that artistic programs have value in crisis zones. It is to embed this conviction in institutional architectures and funding mechanisms.

This involves several shifts. The first is conceptual: integrating arts education into the standard definition of emergency educational aid, on the same level as textbooks or teacher training. UNESCO is working toward this normalization in its framework for responding to educational crises, but the path between policy framework and donor practice remains long.

The second is financial: creating multi-year funding mechanisms for cultural programs in crisis zones, probably through dedicated funds at the interface between humanitarian aid and development. Several donor governments, notably Nordic ones, have experimented with these mechanisms in other sectors with encouraging results.

The third is technical: investing in measuring medium-term outcomes so that programs can demonstrate their effectiveness on horizons compatible with donors’ political cycles. The actors doing this work need it to survive beyond the next funding cycle.

What is at stake in the makeshift classrooms of camps and devastated cities in the Middle East goes beyond the educational question. A generation growing up without having transmitted its narratives, without having learned to create collectively, without having known the continuity of a living culture, does not rebuild social fabric simply because weapons have fallen silent. The question is how many of these programs, fragile and inventive, will survive until institutions decide to protect them.

Sources

  1. UNESCO, Impact of Escalating Conflict on Education Systems in the Arab States: A Rapid Overview and Response (April 2026), https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/impact-escalating-conflict-education-systems-arab-states-unesco-rapid-overview-and-response-april
  2. UNESCO, Global Framework for Culture and Arts Education (2024), https://www.unesco.org/en/culture-arts-education
  3. UNRWA, Education in Emergencies, annual reports (no guaranteed direct link, available at unrwa.org)
  4. Première Urgence Internationale, educational programs in crisis zones (no guaranteed direct link, available at premiere-urgence.org)
  5. UNESCO report on education in Arab states (May 2026)
  6. UNESCO: exact date of report (April 2026)
  7. Sana’a Center: school destruction in Yemen
  8. UNRWA: strikes on shelter schools in Gaza
  9. UN / CRS: UNRWA budget cuts since 2018
  10. PMC: toxic stress and learning capacity in children in conflict
  11. UNESCO Rapid Overview April 2026 - Arab States Education Crisis
  12. UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education 2024
  13. Première Urgence Internationale - official site
  14. UNRWA - Education under attack (artistic activities)
  15. Food Security Cluster / IASC - humanitarian funding cycles