Millions of refugee kids unschooled
A report on displaced people criticises governments that fail to ensure the children get a good education — but recognises that the top refugee hosting countries have made progress in including them in national education systems. It also assesses the effe
‘Education is a human right and a transformational force for poverty eradication, sustainability and peace. People on the move, whether for work or education, and whether voluntarily or forced, do not leave their right to education behind.”
So wrote United Nations secretary general António Guterres in Migration, Displacement and Education: Building Bridges, Not Walls, the 2019 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report published last month by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). The report assesses annually progress towards achieving sustainable development goal 4 on education.
This year the GEM report looks at how countries handle migration and displaced people and how that affects the education of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
In the foreword, Unesco’s director general, Audrey Azoulay, says laws and policies are failing migrant and refugee children by negating their rights and ignoring their needs, and yet these are some of the most vulnerable people in the world. They are also being denied entry into schools that are supposed to be safe havens for them.
“Ignoring the education of migrants squanders a great deal of human potential. Sometimes simple paperwork, lack of data or bureaucratic and unco-ordinated systems mean many people fall through administrative cracks,” she says.
“Yet investing in the education of the highly talented and driven migrants and refugees can boost development and economic growth not only in the host countries but also countries of origin.”
The report estimates that as of 2017 there were 87.3-million displaced people in the world — the highest number since the end of World War II. Of these people, 25.4-million are refugees, 3.1-million are asylum seekers, 40-million have been displaced by conflict and 18.8-million were forced to move, albeit for shorter durations, because of natural disasters.
More than half of all refugees are under the age of 18, and that at least four million aged five to 17 did not attend school in 2017.
Although the report says little about South Africa and how it fares compared with other nations, Anjuli Maistry, an attorney at the Centre for
Child Law, says this should not be interpreted as there being no similar problems in the country.
In her work, Maistry’s focus is on refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, migrants who are not documented (classified as illegal foreigners) and South African children who do not have documents.
She says refugee and asylum seeker children are often removed from school or not admitted at all because they cannot produce a study permit, even though they may have asylum or refugee papers. The national admission policy says that learners need to produce a study permit or produce proof that they have applied to legalise their stay. If they cannot, they should be removed from the school.
Maistry says that denying children the right to an education because they do not have a study permit shows that principals have incorrectly interpreted the admission policy.
“We should be doing away with documentation to access such a basic right as education. There are thousands of children, even South African, who cannot get documents. It is an irreversible damage in a child’s life if they don’t get to go to school.”
The Centre for Child Law is awaiting a judgment by the high court in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) after it took the departments of basic education and home affairs to court to get undocumented learners to be allowed to attend school.