By REUTERS
The United Nations said countries should stop separating refugee children from local pupils and instead place them in national schools to improve integration.
The appeal came as the UN cultural agency, Unesco, said about 4 million child refugees were out of school in 2017. The agency warned that exclusion denies children education and also deprives host countries of a chance to build social cohesion.
Manos Antoninis, who directs Unesco’s annual Global Education Monitoring Report, said the evidence points to positive results when refugees are included in ordinary schools. He told the Thomson Reuters Foundation:
"Experience suggests that the inclusion processes have been very positive,"
He added that keeping refugees apart for too long can deepen isolation.
"The longer (refugees) stay separate, the more they feel alienated,"
he said.
Unesco said the issue remains urgent. Wars, persecution and other violence displaced a record 68.5 million people in 2017, with most uprooted inside their own countries and 25 million classified as refugees by the UN refugee agency.
World leaders in New York agreed in 2016 that refugee and migrant children should receive education within months of arriving in a host country. But Unesco said practice still falls short in several places, including Australia, where asylum-seeking children have limited access to schooling, and Bangladesh, where Rohingya children are largely confined to separate non-formal schools.
In Africa, many refugees remain in camps, a system Unesco said can make later access to jobs more difficult. Antoninis said he hoped governments would become less willing to exclude refugee children from mainstream education.
Uganda was singled out for bringing humanitarian and development agencies together this year to create mixed schools for refugees and host communities. The country hosts the largest refugee population in Africa, at 1.4 million.
Chad, which hosts about 450,000 refugees, has drawn up a temporary education plan while it works to adapt its national system to include them, Unesco said. The agency described the move as a first in Africa.
According to Antoninis, the Chadian government has sent teachers into refugee camps to ease the transition and has converted 108 refugee schools into regular public schools this year so that local children can also benefit. He also said Chad has trained teachers from among the refugee population so they can teach in Chadian schools.
Education, however, remains a low priority in many conflict-hit areas. Euloge Ishimwe, an Africa spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said education is often overlooked during emergencies even though it can help restore stability.
"During emergencies, education is not given the attention it deserves as a life-saving intervention,"
Ishimwe 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."
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
