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This article first appeared on our partner site, Independent Arabia
It is another school day at Al-Mil camp, north of the city of Marib in central Yemen. On the road outside, a school bus carries uniformed pupils towards the city centre. Their families have the financial means to afford private school fees, having given up hope of securing an adequate education within the camps.
On the way here, our vehicle was stopped at a security checkpoint where a soldier inspected travel permits. This routine has become part and parcel of the daily work of journalists and humanitarian teams operating in the area.
A few yards beyond the checkpoint, two secondary-school girls stopped us and asked for a lift to their school, wearing hats to shield themselves from the scorching sun.
When we returned at midday, we engaged them in discussion about the hurdles they were facing in their educational journeys. Their foremost grievance was the sheer overcrowding of classrooms, closely followed by an inadequate supply of textbooks, the exhausting journeys required to commute between home and school, and a deficiency of qualified teachers across specific specialist science subjects.