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Three children died and 11 were injured, two of them seriously, when a school made of straw and wood caught fire in central Niger on Monday, local officials said. The fire broke out in a classroom in a school in Zinder and spread swiftly, fanned by the harmattan seasonal winds, Harou Mamane, secretary general of the regional government, told AFP. “The children panicked and rushed to try to get out” but some were trapped, he said.
The landlocked Sahel country is one of the poorest countries in the world, ranked 189th out of 191 nations in the UN’s 2022 Human Development Index (HDI). Lacking funds, the authorities have built thousands of classrooms made from straw and wood, where children often sit on the floor as they have no desks. The government last November launched a plan to replace all these classrooms with durable and safer substitutes by 2026.
