Billions needed, obstacles need lifting for refugees to get education

UN body says many refugee children are relying on informal networks to study.

A refugee child waits in a bus to take her home to Syria, in the northern Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud, Lebanon, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019. Hundreds of Syrian refugees in Lebanon have gone back to Syria. Lebanon is hosting about 950,000 registered Syrian refugees. That's according to the U.N. refugee agency. The government estimates the true number of Syrian refugees in the country at 1.5 million. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
AP

A refugee child waits in a bus to take her home to Syria, in the northern Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud, Lebanon, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019. Hundreds of Syrian refugees in Lebanon have gone back to Syria. Lebanon is hosting about 950,000 registered Syrian refugees. That's according to the U.N. refugee agency. The government estimates the true number of Syrian refugees in the country at 1.5 million. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

The UN body dedicated to education has called for donors to provide billions in aid in order to help provide refugees and internally displaced children (IDP) with an education.

In an interview with the New Arab, Manos Antoninis, said $2.4 billion were needed to provide 25 million IDPs and refugees with the ability to study.

The director of UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report on Education said that countries also needed to remove obstacles preventing millions of children from getting an education.

The report was released at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), which took place in the Qatari capital of Doha last week.

Organisers said that the amount spent on refugee education in 2016 was an estimated $800 million. 

Antoninis said that current levels only around a third of refugee and IDP children were receiving an education due to “significant lack of funding from donor countries”.

Where funding was coming through it went overwhelmingly to children receiving primary education, with little provided for secondary.

WISE CEO Stavros N Yiannouka said: "Teaching and learning are intrinsically, perhaps uniquely human, and an important element of the social suite that bends the arc of human heritage towards goodness.

“An educated world is a healthier, a more prosperous, a more peaceful, and a fairer world. We cannot leave anyone behind,” he added.

Five of the top 12 countries for IDP populations are Arab states, with Lebanon one key area of concern. The Mediterranean country has received more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees but just a million are registered, meaning most are not within the formal education system.

The UNESCO report also called on Gulf states to better integrate the children of migrants into their public school systems. While private alternatives are available these are costly for poorer migrants.

“Gulf countries have expanded in private education to allow the children of immigrants to enroll in education, but this is linked to the availability of money that imposes the quality of education,” the report said.

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