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AFP
Sanaa
Barefoot in a blue striped shirt, Ahmed al-Hamadi walks from school to a cemetery in the Yemeni capital where he works to help his family survive.
The 13-year-old makes his way through the cemetery, where graves are cramped together and overgrown with weeds. Hauling gallons of water on his tiny shoulders, he waters plants and sprinkles tombstones to rid them of the Sanaa dust for a modest payment from the families of the deceased.
“We usually wait for funeral processions to work,” Ahmed told AFP. “If no one has died, we just hang around the graves and play around here.” Ahmed is among millions of children struggling to stay in school in Yemen, where war, poverty and disease have brought the Arab world’s poorest country to its knees.
The Yemen conflict, which pits the government against northern rebels linked to Iran, took a turn for the worse when Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened on behalf of embattled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.
March 26 marks four years since the Saudi-led coalition launched the military campaign to oust the Huthi rebels who occupied most of Yemen several months earlier -- triggering what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Yemen has the highest level of child labour in the Arab world, both as a percentage and in sheer numbers, according to the International Labour Organization.
And in the chaos of war children are the most at risk, with girls facing forced marriage and boys recruited as fighters.
UNICEF, the UN children’s fund, called Yemen a “living hell for children” in 2018, with a whopping 80 percent of minors in need of aid.
The agency estimates that two million Yemeni children, out of an eligible seven million, are out of school as the war grinds into its fifth year.
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26/03/2019
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