On November 21, 2018, the United Nations called on host countries to stop separating refugee children from local pupils and instead place them in national school systems. The appeal came as UNESCO pointed to Chad and Uganda as examples of poorer countries trying to build more inclusive education models.
UNESCO said about 4 million child refugees were out of school in 2017, leaving them without access to education and denying host communities a chance to build ties across different groups. Manos Antoninis, who heads UNESCO’s annual Global Education Monitoring Report, said the evidence favours inclusion. “Experience suggests that the inclusion processes have been very positive,” he said. He added: “The longer (refugees) stay separate, the more they feel alienated,” in remarks to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The warning came against the backdrop of a wider displacement crisis. The UN refugee agency said wars, persecution and other violence forced a record 68.5 million people from their homes in 2017. Most were displaced within their own countries, while 25 million were refugees.
World leaders agreed in New York in 2016 that refugee and migrant children should receive education within months of arriving in a host country. UNESCO said that promise has not been fully met. It cited Australia, where asylum-seeking children have limited access to education, Bangladesh, where Rohingya children attend separate non-formal schools, and many refugee camps across Africa, where isolation makes later employment harder.
Antoninis said governments should be less willing to keep refugees apart from local children. “The hope is that in the future governments all over the world will be more reluctant to exclude refugees and put them in separate schools,” he said.
UNESCO said only six in 10 refugee children were enrolled in primary school last year, while just one in four were in secondary school.
Uganda, which hosts the largest refugee population in Africa at 1.4 million, has this year brought humanitarian and development agencies together to create mixed schools for refugees and host communities. Chad, which hosts about 450,000 refugees, has drawn up a temporary education plan while it adapts its national system to include refugees, a move UNESCO described as the first of its kind in Africa.
According to Antoninis, Chad has sent Chadian teachers into refugee camps to ease the transition and has converted 108 refugee schools into regular public schools this year so they can serve local children as well. He also said the country has trained teachers from among the refugee population so they can work in Chadian schools.
Even with those examples, education remains sidelined in many conflict zones. Euloge Ishimwe, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Africa, said schooling is often ignored during emergencies. “During emergencies, education is not given the attention it deserves as a life-saving intervention,” he said. “Many people do not know that education in emergencies... brings about a sense of normalcy and hope that in itself can empower communities to protect themselves from harm.”
