The other day during the Africa Children Summit 2025, I was listening to children from Malawi during a breakout room session. They were discussing their experiences with school — but what came out wasn’t about books or lessons or playtime. It was about pain. About fear. About surviving in places that are meant to be safe.
And in that moment, I realised something that stayed with me: violence in schools is not always loud. Sometimes, it whispers. Sometimes, it hides in plain sight. And sometimes, we’ve normalized it so much, we no longer see it for what it truly is — violence.
We tend to think of violence in classrooms as beatings or physical punishment. But it’s so much more than that. It’s when a child is denied access to education simply because they cannot afford fees or don’t have a uniform. It’s when a girl is laughed at for bleeding through her skirt and then stays home for a week every month. It’s when a boy is mocked because he can’t afford lunch and is called names until he refuses to return.
It’s the trauma children are carrying, often in silence.
Our schools, which should be spaces of hope and healing, are turning into sites of quiet suffering. They are places where inequality, poverty and discrimination collide and children are left to pick up the pieces.
We call education a right, yet for many children in Africa, it’s treated like a privilege. Poverty, stigma, and gender-based barriers — from unpaid fees to early pregnancy — push children, especially girls, out of classrooms. Add to that the daily threat of violence and harmful stereotypes, and school becomes a place of silence, shame and invisible wounds.
Poverty creates a vicious cycle. Children from low-income families often miss school, are pushed into labor, and face violence at home or school. With days spent fetching water, working, or caring for siblings, it’s unrealistic to expect them to focus in class. When they do attend, tired and distracted, they’re often punished or labelled as failures. This emotional harm damages their self-esteem. Many children face immense pressure from poverty, abuse, and discrimination, yet there are few outlets to cope or heal. Some fall into depression, while others lose hope altogether.
What we are seeing is a failure of the system. But more than that, it’s a failure of empathy. A failure to prioritise our children’s well-being beyond academics. A failure to create positive school cultures where kindness, care and safety are non-negotiable.
Every child should feel they belong. They need schools where their background doesn’t determine how they are treated. Where gender doesn’t dictate opportunity. Where every teacher understands that their job is not just to educate but to protect and to nurture.
Oh, let us draft the policies. Let us design the perfect framework for a better school culture — inclusive, safe, nurturing. And yes, of course we can. We have the brains, the language, the ambition.
But the real question is: are we practising it? Or, even more honestly, are we ready to practice it?
Policies without action are just ink on paper. Schools can hang charters of children’s rights on the wall, but if those rights are not lived out in the classrooms, in the hallways and in the hearts of every adult interacting with a child — then we’ve failed before we even began.
People often say that change starts with one person. That sounds poetic. But I say real change begins when that one person dares to act differently — even when it’s hard, even when it’s unpopular.
It means teachers who go beyond the curriculum to understand the pain behind a child’s silence. It means training every educator — not just in academics, but in child protection, mental health, trauma-informed care and empathy. It means placing trained counselors in schools, not as an afterthought, but as a necessity. Because children need more than discipline — they need safe spaces to feel, to speak, to heal.
It means breaking the generational culture of silence — the one that says, “Oh hush,” “Toughen up,” “It’s normal,” or “That’s weakness.”
And yes, it means properly funding education — because we can’t talk about equity while children face exclusion, overcrowded classes and schools lacking basic necessities like water, toilets or safe transport. A positive school culture can’t grow on broken foundations.
The children are not asking for miracles. They are asking for dignity. They are asking to be safe.
The African Children Summit Outcome Statement makes it clear: children are demanding an end to violence, to discrimination, to the injustice of being treated as anything less than worthy. And their voices must not just be heard — they must be acted upon.
Because the price of poverty should never be a broken child.