Mukalla, Yemen – Mohamed Salem goes to work every morning to work as a teacher at a state-run school. However, after working at that school, he also goes to teach at a private school. After stopping home for lunch, Mohamed heads to his third job, a hotel, where he works for the rest of the day.
“If I could afford a fourth job, I would take it,” said Mohamed, a teacher with 31 years of experience. He spoke to Al Jazeera outside his apartment in a large housing complex in the eastern suburbs of Mukalla, a port city in southeastern Yemen.
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He took on the additional job due to Yemen’s dire economic situation, particularly the decline of the Yemeni rial against the U.S. dollar in recent years.
“I come home at night completely exhausted,” he said. “Teachers are devastated and have no time to care for their students. During school hours, they focus on the next thing after school.”
Despite working from morning until night, the father of six says he earns less than half what he earned 10 years ago. This is a reduction from $320 to $130 per month.
For more than a decade, Yemen has been mired in bloody conflict between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government. The war has killed thousands, displaced millions, and affected almost every sector, including education.
The conflict has devastated the country’s main sources of revenue, including oil exports, tariffs and taxes, as rival factions fight on the front lines and engage in economic warfare.
The Houthis, who control Yemen’s densely populated central and northern highlands, including the capital Sanaa, have not paid public sector salaries since late 2016, when the internationally recognized government moved its central bank from Sanaa to the southern city of Aden.
Yemen’s government, which controls Aden and the south, has also not raised or regularly paid public sector wages, citing a drop in revenue after Houthi rebels attacked oil export terminals in southern Yemen.
Thousands of Yemeni teachers have expressed frustration with stagnant and delayed salaries, saying they have not received a raise since the war began. Wages are often delayed, and the value of wages has fallen significantly, with the Yemeni rial plummeting from about 215 to the dollar before the war began to about 2,900 to the dollar by mid-2025. The Yemeni rial is currently valued at about 1,560 to the dollar in government-controlled areas.
Faced with meager and irregular incomes, teachers like Mohammed have adopted harsh survival strategies to support their families. His family had to skip meals, cut out protein-rich foods such as meat, fish and dairy products, and move to the outskirts of the city in search of cheaper rent.
He also asked one of his children to drop out of college and join the military instead, which he said earns about 1,000 Saudi riyals ($265) a month.
“When we have money, we buy fish, and when we don’t have anything, we eat rice, potatoes and onions. We don’t get meat and can only get it through donations from mosques or charities during Eid,” Mohammed said.
During holidays and weekends, we let our children sleep until the afternoon so they don’t wake up asking for breakfast.
And if one of your children gets sick, first treat them at home with natural remedies such as herbs and garlic, and only take them to the hospital in severe cases to avoid medical bills that you can’t afford. “I only take my children to the hospital when they are very sick,” he said.
generation at risk
Yemen’s education sector continues to face a catastrophic and multi-layered crisis, according to the Yemen Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026, published on March 29 by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
An estimated 6.6 million school-age children were deprived of their right to education, and 2,375 schools were damaged or destroyed. Teachers have also been severely affected, with approximately 193,668 teachers, or nearly two-thirds of the country’s total, not receiving salaries.
Ali al-Samae, who has been working as a teacher in the al-Wadi district of Marib province since 2001, said his monthly salary of about 90,000 Yemeni riyals barely covers his living expenses.
The financial burden forced him to leave his family of seven from his hometown of Taiz.
“Instead of focusing on preparing classes and using modern teaching methods, all our focus is on how to earn enough money to support our families,” he said. “Before the war, my monthly salary was about 1,200 Saudi Riyals ($320). Now it is about 200 Saudi Riyals ($52),” Al Samaeh told Al Jazeera.
He worked a second job to survive, and his family had to skip meals and cut out meat and chicken. He now visits there only once a year, often arriving empty-handed after spending most of his salary on transport.
“Now we just live to survive rather than teach. In the past, we could live on a monthly salary, but now that is not enough. Even milk has become a luxury. Life has become very difficult.”
Part-time teachers say they are worse off than full-time teachers because the government neither increases their pay nor adds it to their official salaries.
Hana al-Rubaki, a part-time teacher in Mukalla and the sole breadwinner for her mother and three sisters, told Al Jazeera that her salary barely covers 10 days’ worth of living expenses.
Despite eight years of service, she earns the same as a newly hired contract teacher. He said, “Even though I have been working for 8 years, there is no job stability,” and “There is no difference from the contract workers who joined last year, and everyone receives the same salary.” “After taxes, my salary is only 70,000 Yemeni Riyals ($44) per month. Because the cost of living is high, it feels more like a nominal allowance than an actual salary.”
She added that delayed payments make her situation worse. “Lack of pay disrupts our daily lives and leaves us struggling to meet even the most basic needs. While some teachers may be able to find additional work to support their families, it is incredibly difficult for us female teachers to do so as well.”
Protests and patchwork solutions
To highlight their plight and pressure the government to increase salaries, teachers in government-controlled areas staged sit-ins, took to the streets to protest, went on strike and disrupted education for months.
The government, wracked by internal divisions, spending most of the year abroad and short on funds, has largely left the matter to local authorities.
Some governors responded by approving modest incentives. In Hadramout, an increase of 25,000 Yemeni riyals ($16) per month was approved, while in other regions the increase was 30,000 Yemeni riyals ($19), up to 50,000 Yemeni riyals ($32).
“The incentives offered by local authorities vary from state to state, depending on the priorities of each governor and their capacity to support teachers in their region,” Abdullah al-Khanbashi, head of the Hadramout teachers’ union, told Al Jazeera, adding that protests will continue until teachers receive better and more regular salaries.
“Teachers show up in torn clothes, and sometimes students show up with more money in their pockets than they do. Some families have been torn apart, some have been kicked out of their homes because they can’t pay rent. Some teachers have children suffering from malnutrition because they can’t afford to feed them,” he said.
Abdullah al-Bazeli, head of the teachers’ union in Marib region, said local farmers had stepped in to help teachers stay in the classroom by providing them with some of their produce.
“Farmers support teachers, especially those coming from outside the province, by providing them with free tomatoes, potatoes and other vegetables,” al-Bazeli said.
He also called for teachers’ salaries to be increased to ministerial levels. “A teacher’s salary should be equal to that of a pastor. Teachers educate generations, but pastors often have no meaningful impact. Some teachers are starting to die of hunger,” he told Al Jazeera.
In areas controlled by Houthi rebels, teachers rarely took to the streets to protest pay cuts. That’s because authorities have suppressed dissent and accuse the Yemeni government and Saudi-led coalition of imposing a “blockade” they say is hampering the ability of the public sector to pay wages.
Yemen’s government has acknowledged the problem of low salaries, saying it has been unable to raise public sector salaries due to revenue losses and disruptions during the war. Tareq Salem al-Akbari, who served as Yemen’s Minister of Education from 2020 to 2026, told Al Jazeera: “The main reasons are weak financial resources due to the war and repeated instabilities that have damaged institutions and revenue streams.”
Teachers interviewed by Al Jazeera said they were impatient with repeated promises of higher salaries and warned that they might quit teaching altogether if they found better-paying jobs that would avoid hunger or begging in public places.
“The thought of quitting teaching has always been in my mind, but I haven’t been able to find an alternative job,” said Mohammed Salem. “It’s sad and sometimes brings tears to my eyes when I see teachers begging at the mosque or calling at the hospital asking for help with their child’s medical expenses.”
