Giving Compass' Take:
- This brief highlights critical challenges in refugee education to help inform refugee education donors, policymakers, and implementers.
- Why is refugee education an urgent issue for displaced communities, and how can donors respond to this urgency?
- Read about this framework for refugee education.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Globally, education is in crisis, with steep inequities, low learning outcomes, irrelevant content, and ineffective learning and teaching strategies in many settings. The global education crisis is also a global refugee education crisis, as far too many refugee students must contend with barriers to access, low quality, and limited relevance in their learning opportunities. Refugee education continues to be under-supported in policy dialogue and funding. As advocacy efforts push for global and national commitments to equitable, high-quality education for all, this paper is intended to help ensure refugee education is part of the education transformation agenda.
This paper is intended for refugee education donors, policymakers, and implementers and aims to inform policy dialogue by answering the following three questions:
- Why is refugee education more urgent than ever?
- What are the key tensions in refugee education and how might they be addressed?
- How does centering refugee voices and engagement in education policy and programming advance the sector?
Throughout the paper, policy questions for further discussion are presented. In some cases, these questions highlight areas where further evidence and experience is needed. In others, the questions shine a light on issues where there is clear evidence of what works but the political will and financing needed to act on this evidence has not yet been mobilized. The paper concludes by presenting opportunities for future action.
Read the full article about refugee education by Maysa Jalbout and Katy Bullard at Brookings.
Forced displacement is happening at an unprecedented scale. In the wake of the attack on Ukraine, the number of forcibly displaced people globally surpassed 100 million for the first time in 2022, according to the United Nations (UNHCR, 2022b). As both new and long-standing crises—from the recent war in Ukraine to protracted conflicts and humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar, and beyond—force families to seek sanctuary and safety beyond their home countries, education of refugee students and engagement of refugee teachers has become an increasingly urgent issue for affected communities, national governments, and the global education sector.