Amhara Mahber of Arizona| April 2026
Sources: UNICEF · UN OCHA · Human Rights Watch · U.S. State Department · Ethiopian Human Rights Commission · Addis Standard · NORRAG · Lancet/Sage Journals
Imagine a country where nearly half of all school-age children in an entire region have been locked out of classrooms — not for one year, not for two, but going into their third consecutive year. Imagine mothers watching their daughters forced into early marriages because there is no school to send them to. Imagine a boy in North Gojjam whose greatest risk each day is not a math exam, but a drone circling over his village. Now stop imagining. This is the reality facing the Amhara people of Ethiopia right now.
This is not a story of war as a side effect. This is the story of what happens when an education system is allowed — and engineered — to collapse. And the Amhara community must name it for what it is: the methodical destruction of an entire people’s future.
THE NUMBERS: A Catastrophe Without Parallel
Numbers do not feel pain. But they tell a truth that is impossible to look away from.
- 4.4 million children out of school in the Amhara region (2024/2025 academic year) [UNICEF, Jan. 2025]
- 4,178+ schools closed in Amhara alone due to conflict and insecurity [UN OCHA, 2024]
- 21% student enrollment rate when the 2024 school year opened — out of 7 million expected [Wazema Radio / East African Review, Sept. 2024]
- ~60% of Amhara school-age children not attending school as of Feb. 2025 [Amhara Regional President, Feb. 12, 2025]
- Less than 10% of students in all North Gojjam zone with access to formal education (2025) [Ethiopia Education Cluster / NORRAG, 2026]
- Only 8.9% of Grade 12 students passed the 2025 national exam above 50% [Minister of Education, Sept. 2025]
To put these numbers in human terms: the 4.1 million children out of school in Amhara is a number larger than the entire population of many African countries. These are not statistics. Each one is a child — a daughter who dreamed of becoming a nurse, a son who wanted to be a teacher, a teenager who once stayed up late reading by lamplight.
“The number of out-of-school children in Amhara is larger than the population of many African countries.” — Mulunesh Dessie (PhD), Amhara Regional Education Bureau, August 2025
HOW IT HAPPENED: Schools Turned into War Zones
When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched his military campaign to disarm the Amhara Fano forces beginning in April 2023, it was the children who paid the first and heaviest price.
What happened to Amhara’s schools did not happen by accident. Schools across the region’s rural highlands — in West and East Gojjam, North and South Gondar, and North Wollo — were physically occupied by the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and repurposed as military bases and detention sites. In the words of education researchers who tracked this crisis, schools were the first to suffer: shut down, occupied by armed forces, and in some places, students and teachers were caught in the crossfire, or worse. (Ethiopia Insight, Aug. 2025)
In May 2024, a drone strike in the North Shewa zone hit a school compound on a holiday, killing seven schoolteachers who had gathered there. This was not collateral damage. This was a drone, operated by a government that had signed the international Safe Schools Declaration, killing teachers on school grounds. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Report on Ethiopia documented this incident.
By mid-September 2024, when the new academic year was supposed to begin, only 1.5 million of the expected 7 million students had enrolled — a 21% rate. In South Gondar and areas around Debre Tabor, enrollment was nearly zero. In North and Central Gondar, military activity had made registration completely impossible.
Teachers, too, fled their lives. Without teachers, even the few schools that remained physically standing became empty shells.
“If you want to destroy a nation, destroy its education system. But what is happening in Ethiopia is not mere neglect — it is a slow, painful self-destruction.” — Ethiopia Insight, August 2025
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE: The Government’s Role Cannot Be Denied
We want to be honest with our community here in Arizona, and with anyone who reads this article. The war in Amhara is complicated. The Fano resistance exists because the Amhara people had legitimate grievances — the disarmament of regional forces, the unresolved Wolkait territorial question, the targeting of Amhara communities after the Tigray peace deal. Fano fighters have also, at times, caused civilian harm, and we do not deny that.
But the scale of the destruction being visited upon the Amhara civilian population, and especially upon its children and its schools, traces back to decisions made by the Ethiopian federal government. This is not the opinion of the Amhara diaspora alone. It is the documented finding of international institutions that no one can dismiss as biased:
Human Rights Watch (World Report 2025): ‘In Amhara, government forces carried out extrajudicial executions, sexual violence, torture, and ill-treatment against civilians, and used drones and heavy artillery against civilians, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).’
U.S. State Department 2024 Human Rights Report: Documents drone strikes on civilian areas, summary executions, mass arrests of ethnic Amhara in Addis Ababa, and the use of converted schools and warehouses as detention centers.
Freedom House (2025): Reports over 9,000 fatalities from the ongoing conflict in Amhara and Oromia between January and November 2024 alone, citing ACLED data.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government has repeatedly blocked journalists from entering Amhara, shut down mobile internet for over a year in major cities (restored only in July 2024), and suspended human rights organizations that dared to document the abuses. As of June 2024, 54 journalists had fled Ethiopia since 2020, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
When a government simultaneously wages war on a civilian population, silences the press, and then tells the world that schools are closed because of ‘security challenges,’ we must refuse to accept that framing.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE CHILDREN: A Crisis Beyond Classrooms
The destruction of education is never just about missed school years. It is a wound that travels with a child for life, and it reshapes an entire society for generations.
A 2025 study published in the Sage academic journal documented that in Bahir Dar City alone, Felege Hiwot Hospital treated 156 people — many of them children and adolescents — for suicide attempts directly linked to the loss of school, loss of purpose, and loss of hope caused by the war. These are children who internalized conflict as personal failure. They are not soldiers. They are not political actors. They are kids who needed a classroom.
Beyond mental health, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has confirmed that with no access to education, thousands of children are being pushed into exploitative child labor, early marriage, and forced migration. A local official was quoted saying: ‘Because they are not educated, and their families are losing their source of income, they are being forced to work at an early age; their labor is being exploited, and their rights are being violated.’
Girls are especially vulnerable. Without the protection of a school environment, girls across conflict-affected Amhara zones face drastically higher rates of early marriage — stripping away their futures at the most critical years of their development.
The academic damage is equally profound. The national Grade 12 exam of 2025 saw only 8.9% of all students pass — down from a national pool that itself shrank from nearly 900,000 test-takers in 2022 to fewer than 600,000 in 2025. Addis Ababa — a city with less than 20% of Amhara’s population — produced 10,690 Grade 12 passers. The entire Amhara region, with over 7 million school-age children, saw 9,152 students who could not even sit the exam at all due to active conflict.
“The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said, speaking of three to four years without school: It is like stealing so many years from their lives.”
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: Watching, But Not Acting
UNICEF, UN OCHA, the World Bank, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International — every major international body has sounded the alarm. UNICEF confirmed in January 2025 that over 9 million children nationwide are out of school. UN OCHA put Amhara’s share at 49% of that total. The World Bank noted that Ethiopia’s spending on education as a share of GDP fell from 5.5% in 2017 to 3.7% in 2022, and that real education spending dropped from 110 billion birr in 2019/2020 to 72 billion birr in 2023/2024.
Reports have been written. Condemnations have been issued. And yet the war continues. The schools remain closed. The drones still fly. Ethiopia’s international partners — including Western governments — have largely normalized their relationships with Abiy Ahmed’s administration, with little accountability demanded for the ongoing destruction of Amhara’s children.
As the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect noted in early 2026, ‘throughout 2025 Ethiopian authorities escalated repression of independent civil society and the media by suspending and closing prominent rights organizations.’ The abuses are not slowing — they are intensifying.
OUR VOICE FROM ARIZONA: WHAT WE MUST DO
We, the Amhara community in Arizona, are thousands of miles from the rubble of those classrooms. But we are not removed from responsibility. We carry these children’s futures in our hands as much as anyone. Here is what we are calling on every member of our community, and every person of conscience, to do:
- TELL THE TRUTH. Share this article. Share the data. Do not let the Ethiopian government’s media blackout determine what the world knows about Amhara. Every time you post, share, or speak, you are breaking a wall they have tried to build.
- CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. Write to your U.S. Senators and House Representatives and demand they press Ethiopia for an immediate ceasefire and civilian protection, including the demilitarization of schools. Ethiopian-Americans have every right — and obligation — to use the political tools of this democracy.
- SUPPORT EDUCATION AID DIRECTLY. Donate to verified organizations providing emergency educational support in Amhara. The Amhara Mahber of Arizona can help direct you to trustworthy channels. Every school-in-a-box kit, every teacher salary covered, every tent-classroom funded is a small act of rescue.
- DOCUMENT AND PRESERVE. Many Amhara families in the diaspora have firsthand accounts, photos, and testimony from relatives on the ground. Collect these stories. Archive them. The world must know — and history must remember.
CLOSING: A PROVERB THEY ARE TRYING TO PROVE TRUE
There is a saying: ‘If you want to destroy a nation, destroy its education system.’ In Amhara today, that is not a proverb. It is a policy.
In North Gojjam, over 90% of school-age children currently have no access to formal education. In one of the ancient heartlands of Ethiopian civilization — a land that gave the world the Ge’ez script, the Orthodox monastery, the scholar-priests of Lalibela — children cannot read. Not because they lack ability. Not because their parents do not care. Because the government of their own country turned their schools into barracks.
The Amhara people have survived famine, occupation, and political marginalization before. They have always rebuilt. But rebuilding requires the world to see what is being destroyed first — and to refuse the comfortable silence of looking away.
We will not look away. We ask you not to, either.
KEY SOURCES
- UNICEF Ethiopia Education Update, January 2025
- UN OCHA Ethiopia, April 2024 (X / Social Media Report on Amhara Schools)
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025: Ethiopia (January 2025)
- U.S. Department of State, Ethiopia 2024 Human Rights Report
- Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025: Ethiopia
- Ethiopia Education Cluster Quarterly Newsletter (Q2, 2024) — ReliefWeb
- Addis Standard, ‘Millions Remain Out of School as Amhara Plans to Register 7.4M Students,’ August 2025
- East African Review, ‘Schools Repurposed as Military Bases in Amhara,’ September 2024
- East African Review, ‘Bring Amhara Children Back to School,’ June 2025
- NORRAG, ‘Ethiopia’s Education Crisis Continues,’ February 2026
- Ethiopia Insight, ‘Education Under Siege in Ethiopia,’ August 2025
- Awoke Mihretu, ‘Educational Disruption and Child Mental Health in Ethiopia,’ Sage Journals, 2025
- Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS), ‘Understanding the Conflict in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region,’ January 2025
- The New Humanitarian, ‘Who is Fano? Inside Ethiopia’s Amhara Rebellion,’ November 2024
- Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Ethiopia Country Report, 2025–2026
- Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Annual Assessment June 2024 – May 2025
Amhara Mahber of Arizona| amharamahberaz.org| April 2026
Republication encouraged with attribution. The truth must travel.