The refugee crisis is far from over

Last year, images of desperate refugees, many of them children, stirred our collective conscience and prompted world leaders to take action. But a year of political upheaval has diverted media attention from refugees’ plight. Against the backdrop of Brexit, terrorist attacks, and national elections in the United States, France and Britain, we have lost sight of the fact that the refugee crisis is getting worse.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has launched its #Withrefugees petition, to remind governments that they must work together to end the crisis.

All refugees and asylumseekers need help, but children are especially vulnerable. One of the best ways to mitigate their plight is to provide them with an education. And yet host countries, which are often near war zones, have struggled to integrate refugee children into their education systems. Among Unhcrregistered refugees, including those fleeing from Afghanistan and Somalia, 3.75 million children – 900,000 of them Syrian – are not in school. All told, the chance that a refugee child will be deprived of schooling is five times higher than the global average.

This is a stain on the international community. It is crucial that refugee children receive an education, so that they can someday return to their home countries with the skills and knowledge needed to create functioning states.

Education is also a vital instrument for combating violent extremism, which can capture the minds of young people with no hope for the future. And school attendance is essential for children’s welfare, because it gives them access to basic healthcare services and protects them from the horrors of child labour and prostitution.

Although the 2016 Supporting Syria and the Region Conference in London garnered aid pledges totalling $12 billion, many of these funds have been severely delayed or have never materialised. A recent study from the children’s charity Theirworld finds that just $400 million of the $1.4b pledged for education has been delivered.

It is difficult to confirm if individual governments are meeting their pledges, but it has become abundantly clear that the international community overall is moving far too slowly. We cannot keep starting and stopping children’s schooling while waiting for funding. The longer children are out of school, the harder it becomes to get them back in the classroom and on track to complete their studies.

Beyond meeting its funding commitments, the international community needs to increase its investment in mobile and scalable education technologies. For example, remote-learning tools would be especially useful for educating children in refugee communities. One good teacher would be able to reach anywhere that has satellite technology, solarpowered computer hardware and an interactive live feed.

This is the idea behind Teach to Reach Remote Classrooms, a Unhcr-funded distance-learning programme overseen by the Varkey Foundation. With TRC, a teacher in a studio in Ghana’s capital, Accra, can live-stream lessons to around 300 school-age refugee children, many of whom have fled conflict in Cote d’ivoire and now attend a primary school in the Ampain Refugee Camp in western Ghana. These displaced children are now catching up on their basic education, while also learning the language of their host country. And they will be well positioned to pursue secondary or higher education in the future.

But politicians must also step up and take action. Leaders around the world, especially those who have been recently elected, should put responding to the global refugee crisis at the top of their agendas.

The world cannot expect a small group of countries on the borders of war zones to bear sole responsibility for displaced people. Countries that are fortunate enough to have peace and security must do their part.

Elias Bou Saab is a former Lebanese education minister.