Tanzania : four more schools closed in Burundian refugee camps

SOS Médias Burundi

Kigoma, October 15, 2025 – Four more schools attended by Burundian refugees were closed this week in the Nyarugusu and Nduta camps in northwest Tanzania. These closures come on top of some fifteen others recorded last month, causing serious concern among refugees who see them as a strategy to force them to return to Burundi.

The concerned schools are Urafiki, Uwezo, and Furaha, located in the Nyarugusu camp, where they housed approximately 9,000 pupils. In the Nduta camp, the Undugu school, located in Zone 9, was forced to close its doors.

According to several teachers and principals interviewed, UNHCR employees in charge of education in the camps, accompanied by Tanzanian administration officials, closed these schools.
“They say the children must return to Burundi to properly pursue their studies,” said a teacher from Nyarugusu.

In some areas of the camp, particularly in Nyarugusu, churches that were used as classrooms were also closed.

Families invited to return

Camp officials urged families to keep their children at home or to consider voluntary return to Burundi.
“The school year has just started in Burundi; you won’t be delayed,” the president of the Nyarugusu camp reportedly said during a meeting with parents.

Distraught refugees critical of the UNHCR

Already by the end of September, more than ten schools, including four secondary schools, had been closed in these camps in the Kigoma region, marking a series of decisions deemed coercive by the refugees.

“The UNHCR has no place here. It’s powerless. It surrendered, and if it’s not careful, it too risks closing its offices at the sight of the Tanzanian authorities’ anger. The UNHCR staff are pathetic, they watch like spectators,” laments a refugee leader from Nyarugusu.

A call to the United Nations

The refugees are now calling on the United Nations to note “these violations of their basic rights,” asserting that they can no longer count on the Tanzanian government.
“Let them do what they want, many of us will choose to die here,” confides another refugee from the Nduta camp bitterly.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 110,000 Burundian refugees still live in Tanzania, most of them in the Nyarugusu and Nduta camps. The majority of them had fled the 2015 political crisis, triggered by the late President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a controversial third term.