Sudan teachers strike for a third week as $13 salaries last days

Teachers across Khartoum State have now been off the job for three weeks, and the math behind their anger is brutal. Amal Suleiman Ahmed al-Haj, a secondary school teacher of 26 years, takes home 132,000 Sudanese pounds a month — about $13.20. A single cooking gas cylinder costs roughly 170,000 pounds, or $17.

That salary does not stretch a quarter of the way through her family's needs, Amal told Al Jazeera, lasting three or four days at best. She says colleagues now take evening jobs to survive, making them, in her words, secondary workers in the education sector. Promotion paths have dried up, unpaid entitlements have piled up, and some classrooms at her school are unsafe — one roof has collapsed, leaving lessons under open sun.

The teachers say they tried everything before walking out. Memorandums went to the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance and the presidential palace, and to the media, with nothing to show for it. Amal describes staff who walk long distances to reach school and others who faint from malnutrition and exhaustion. Teachers are human beings with families and responsibilities, she said, and they are not asking for luxuries — just enough to live and keep teaching.

The Sudanese Teachers' Committee has run staggered, intermittent strikes rather than one continuous shutdown. Spokesperson Sami al-Baqir said participation started broad but thinned after what he called government attempts to undermine the action: attendance controls loosened so schools looked functional, funding mechanisms handed to model schools, and partial arrears paid out just as new strikes were announced. A long-haul strike is now planned to absorb those tactics, he told Al Jazeera.

After ministers met unions last month, Prime Minister Kamil Idris ordered arrears paid to teachers in every Sudanese state — but no payment schedule followed, and salary and allowance demands went unanswered. The committee wants the minimum wage lifted to 500,000 pounds ($50), up from 12,000 pounds ($1.20), based on poverty-line benchmarks and its own cost-of-living study for a family of five. It also wants three cabinet decisions from more than seven months ago implemented: a meal allowance of 90,000 pounds ($9), a housing allowance, and a 130,000-pound ($13) allowance to close pay gaps in the public sector. Al-Baqir called the delay proof the government is not serious about teachers' problems.

The war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023, sits underneath all of it. The UN has documented 67 attacks on schools since 2024 and more than 150 reports of armed groups seizing education facilities. Lily Neyestani-Hailu, UNESCO's head of education in emergencies, said around 30 percent of Sudan's schools are damaged or closed and more than 1,400 have been attacked, pushing hundreds of thousands of children out of class. By Sudan Education Cluster figures from January, 97 percent of schools in North Darfur have stopped classes, with only 13 percent operating in South Darfur and 27 percent in West Darfur. At least 8 million children are out of school nationwide. Al-Baqir's fear is blunt: that public education gets phased out entirely, telling parents that only those who can pay for private schooling will keep their children learning.