Sanaa, Yemen – At 7am, Qasim, 14, rises and begins his daily struggle. He leaves his family’s rented apartment, carrying a white sack about one metre long and half a metre wide. He hopes to fill it by 11:30am.
Qasim collects plastic bottles. A sack full of these bottles can earn him up to 1,500 Yemeni riyal, about $3. Buyers gather these items to be recycled in factories
That money helps Qasim buy lunch for his six-member family. In the afternoon, he can be a child again, sometimes playing football with other children in the neighbourhood
But that’s when it’s the turn of Qasim’s brother, 12-year-old Asem, to collect bottles, which he then sells at night. That helps cover the family’s dinner costs.
To Qasim and Asem, schooling is a luxury that the family cannot afford. Instead, the priority is meeting the family’s daily living expenses
“I was studying at a government school in Sanaa. When I reached the fourth grade in 2024, I stopped going to the classroom. I wanted to help provide for my family, and my brother did the same in 2025,” Qasim tells Al Jazeera, wiping his hollow cheeks with his right hand
“Sitting in the classroom would not feed me,” Qasim says in a low voice as he gazes at his sack in a busy neighbourhood in Sanaa
For more than a decade, Yemen has been embroiled in a bloody conflict between the Iran-backed Houthis and the Saudi-backed government, a strife that has affected almost all population groups, including schoolchildren
Nowadays, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 3.2 million school-aged children in Yemen are out of school, and 1.5 million displaced children are at risk of permanent school dropout.
Although fighting on the country’s front lines has largely stopped since an April 2022 ceasefire, millions of children remain deprived of access to schooling.
Years of war have altered countless parents’ attitudes towards education. Fathers no longer feel guilty seeing their children work instead of studying.
Qasim’s father, Abdu, a 48-year-old daily wage worker, admits that he does not have regrets about seeing his children outside the classroom, collecting plastic bottles every day
The real pain he feels, he says, is when he cannot meet the family’s basic needs
“Seeing a hungry child is more painful than seeing a child drop out,” says Abdu
Abdu has not left Sanaa since the war began in 2014, and he has seen how university and high school graduates have suffered
“I sometimes work on construction sites as a guard or a digger or a porter, and I find graduates doing or seeking similar jobs,” Abdu tells Al Jazeera.
He adds, “Why should I let my children spend years at school and then come to work in such jobs? They can start working now instead
During the fourth Riyadh International Humanitarian Forum last year, Yemen’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Waed Badhib, said that the war had inflicted heavy losses on the national economy exceeding $250bn, and led to unemployment rates rising to 35 percent
Parents spent lots of money on their children’s education,” Abdu notes. “Today, so many of them cannot land the jobs for which they were trained. It feels like what they did was a waste of time and cash.
Widespread unemployment among graduates has led many parents to disparage the benefits of an education. But Mahmoud al-Bukari, an academic and the deputy head of the social affairs labour office in Taiz, explains that – in the long run – they could be seriously harming their children’s prospects
He knows that, for now, he can get by selling the plastic bottles he collects. His next aim is to learn a trade and make a living.
I want to be excellent in painting, carpentry, or welding,” says Qasim. “I try to learn any skill I can in this city. I will not return to the classroom.”
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