Refugee kids deserve education and hope
Young minds among the world’s most disadvantaged groups must have access to education
The ongoing flood of refugees from Afghanistan — now some 2.6 million strong — is sadly no isolated tragedy. Indeed, if all of today’s 82.4 million refugees and forcibly displaced persons were gathered into a single state it would be the world’s 20th largest country by population. If current trends continue, and climate change adds substantially to the numbers as the World Bank predicts, the number of refugees and displaced persons by mid-century could exceed the population of Brazil, and nearly that of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France combined. With sea levels rising, some forecasters suggest that the world’s displaced population could exceed one billion.
Long before we heard anything about a novel coronavirus, the rising number of refugees was being driven by the pathogens of war and ethnic and religious hatred, and by our collective inability to feel others’ pain. Refugee “camps” have become permanent cities, where they have been living for almost 20 years on average, with no end in sight. Tragically, among the millions suffering from this disruption is a lost generation of young people with little access to education and employment.
Among today’s displaced youth are potential leaders with the capabilities and drive to make the world a more prosperous and less dangerous place. But what chance is there for a young person trapped in a besieged town in Syria or Afghanistan to show their genius? Or for a child in the midst of the conflict in Yemen, Chad, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, or Libya, or in the South Sudanese refugee camps on the Ugandan border?
Life-changing opportunities
The refugee problem is now so widespread that even in wealthy Europe, thousands of young people in the Moria camp in Greece — until it burnt down in 2020 — were receiving no formal education. Two summers ago, three adolescents in Moria — aged 12, 13, and 14 — reached such levels of despair that they attempted suicide.
Yes, hope dies when a refugee boat capsizes, a food convoy can’t reach hungry people, and a hospital has no doctors to treat patients with Covid-19. But hope also dies when a young person cannot prepare for the future and is unable even to dream of a different life. This happens when they are denied the education.
There is no single-shot vaccine that will end the exploding refugee crisis. But amid the chaos, efforts are under way to provide life-changing educational opportunities to young people living without the advantages of more stable, supportive environments.
For school-age refugee children and youth, new hope dawned in 2016 with the launch of Education Cannot Wait, a United Nations global fund. Since its inception, the initiative has not only reached an estimated 4.6 million children trapped in some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, but it has also acted as the catalyst for aid agencies to help millions more.
For university-age students, the Institute of International Education’s online Platform for Education in Emergencies Response offers pathways to continue formal and informal higher education. These include the University of the People, a tuition-free online university accredited in 2014 that counts 7,000 refugees among its 106,000 students. The university has promised the United Nations that it will enrol 25,000 refugee students by 2030.
Extending hope and opportunity to young people at risk of being left behind is a powerful way to advance these values, foster peace and stability, and bring about a transformative and durable solution to the refugee crisis. We know that we can find young potential leaders among the most disadvantaged group of all — the displaced — and give them access to advanced education. An innovative, competitive programme would provide refugee and displaced students with fellowships for two full years of graduate study, in any field, within the country where they have found refuge or anywhere in the world. If this initiative can attract the funding it needs to be successful, it will take its place alongside other respected, enduring, and high-impact scholarship programmes, and, like them, over time it will take thousands of young people from where they are to what they can become.
Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. Allan Goodman is President of the Institute of International Education.