The Great
Disconnect

The shutdown of schools last February due to Covid-19 affected over 10 million children aged 6 to 17 across Iraq. Globally, the pandemic has created the largest educational disruption in history according to the UN. But in Iraq, school closures have become the latest impediment to the right to education for millions of children who have, in the recent past, already lost years of schooling.

As classes are set to resume partly for some children and exclusively for others through distance learning programs, many pupils and their families will have to cope with the practical burden and psychological toll of home-schooling in what is often a precarious environment. All while struggling to connect to the online platforms that are designed to enable their remote education.

These challenges make distance learning subpar at best and impossible at worst for the most vulnerable segments of the population, NRC has found through extensive interviews.

Here are the stories of five of those children and their families.