Sudan Is the Global Higher-Ed Crisis No One Is Talking About
Karin Fischer | 06 November 2024 | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Campuses destroyed or occupied. Students and professors displaced internally or forced to flee the country. Struggles to access student records or hold online classes.
Such descriptions have become chillingly commonplace amid conflict and upheaval around the globe, in Ukraine, Gaza, and Afghanistan. Add to that list Sudan, battered by a year-and-a-half-long civil war and a related humanitarian crisis.
A report from the Rift Valley Institute, an education-focused nonprofit organization that operates in eastern and central Africa, details the toll on Sudanese higher education. The ferocity of the fighting in Khartoum, the capital and Sudan’s educational hub, has dislocated the “overwhelming majority” of the country’s 700,000 students and 14,000 professors. Yet some institutions have managed to keep going in some capacity, allowing students to continue or even complete their studies….