Norrag News 53 Refugees, Displaced Persons and Education
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NORRAG REFUGEES, NEWS DISPLACED PERSONS 53 AND EDUCATION: MAY NEW CHALLENGES 2016 FOR DEVELOPMENT AND POLICY NORRAG NEWS 53 MAY 2016 Editorial Address for this Special Issue: Kenneth King, Saltoun Hall, Pencaitland, Scotland, EH34 5DS, UK Email: [email protected] The invaluable support to the Editor by Robert Palmer is very warmly acknowledged. Email: [email protected] Secretariat Address: Michel Carton, Executive Director Email: [email protected] Aude Mellet, Communication Offi cer Email : [email protected] Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Post Box 136, Rue Rothschild 20, 1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland. NORRAG is supported by: NORRAG is hosted by: NORRAG News 53 is freely available on our website www.norrag.org in May 2016 What is NORRAG? NORRAG is a worldwide, multi-stakeholder network which has been seeking to inform, challenge and infl uence international education and training policies and cooperation for 30 years. Through networking and other forms of cooperation and institutional partnerships, it aims in particular to: • stimulate and disseminate timely, concise, critical analysis and act as an incubator for new ideas • broker knowledge at the interface between research, policy and practice NORRAG’s current programme focuses on the following themes: • Education and training policies in the Agenda 2030 • Global governance of education and training and the politics of data • Urban violence, youth and education • International perspectives on technical and vocational skills development (TVSD) policies and practice For more information, please visit: www.norrag.org What is NORRAG News? NORRAG News is a digital analytical report that is produced twice a year. Each issue has a large number of short, sharp articles, focusing on policy implications of research fi ndings and/or on the practical implications of new policies on international education and training formulated by development agencies, foundations and NGOs. The niche of NORRAG has been to identify a number of ‘red threads’ running through the complexity of the debates and the current aid and cooperation discourse, and to dedicate special issues of NORRAG News to the critical analysis of these themes. Many issues of NORRAG News have been translated into French and Spanish, as well as into Chinese and Arabic from 2014 onwards. NORRAG News is supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), whilst its translation into Arabic is made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Higher Education of the Sultanate of Oman. None of these organisations is responsible for the content of NORRAG News. Other ways to engage with NORRAG: • NORRAG NEWSBite: htt p://norrag.wordpress.com/ NORRAG’s Blog about international education, training and development aid and policy. • Follow NORRAG on Twitt er - @NORRAG_NEWS • Follow NORRAG on facebook - @NORRAG NORRAG News 53 REFUGEES, DISPLACED PERSONS AND EDUCATION: NEW CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPMENT AND POLICY Initiating Memorandum for NORRAG News (NN) 53 When the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report (GMR) of 2011 focused on The Hidden Crisis: Armed Confl ict and Education, its focus was not principally with refugees at all, but with the massively deleterious eff ect of confl ict on education. Arguably, the refugee crisis now aff ecting Europe has made this hidden crisis dramatically more open for Europe’s population, though this crisis has not been at all hidden for those states neighboring confl ict. The World Economic Forum (WEF) of 2016 has argued that ‘top of the list of risks of highest concern …by a considerable margin, was large-scale involuntary migration’. Put another way, migration’s sudden impact on the front-line states of Europe and on the main European destinations, Germany and Sweden, has brought into the open and into focus the millions of refugees already located in refugee camps and in host communities in countries surrounding Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Palestine etc. In other words, the great burden of support for refugees and displaced persons has been long carried by countries of the Global South, with the assistance of the international relief agencies. This issue of NORRAG News (NN) draws att ention to many diff erent dimensions of refugees, displaced persons and education, but it is not focused on economic migration or on migration for higher education per se, but on what the WEF calls ‘involuntary migration’ and its connections with education. Amongst NN53’s many concerns are, fi rstly, the way that the sheer scale of the refugee crisis has captured Western media and political att ention. The reports of the possibility of reaching Germany or Sweden have translated into a once-in-a-lifetime chance of gaining access to Europe with its perceived education, employment and welfare opportunities. By contrast in the countries such as Lebanon and Jordan where almost one in fi ve and one in seven persons respectively in the entire population is a refugee, the crisis caught media att ention years ago. Second, and related to the fi rst, are questions about whether Europe’s bilateral aid agencies as well as the European Commission, the UN agencies and the World Bank will need to rethink their development cooperation to take account of the costs of supporting genuine refugees and asylum seekers in Europe. If so, this would parallel the long-standing debate about whether the imputed costs of scholarships to Southern students into countries such as Germany, Japan and France can be counted as development aid (See recent GMRs). Will aid budgets need to be restructured to ensure that they are spent on what DFID calls the great global challenges – such as the root causes of mass migration? Will humanitarian aid need to be rethought so that education constitutes more than the present 2%? Third, there are huge diff erences between what can be called the protracted refugees crises such as that of the Palestinians, still located in camps around the Middle East, including in Syria, more than 65 years aft er their fl ight, on the one hand, and the expulsion of the Uganda Asians in 1972, for example, where no one has been in a camp for ages, on the other. The diff erence in educational expenditure is massive, since UNWRA is still supporting some 500,000 school children in its schools across the Middle East region as well as many as 7,000 thousand TVET students. 6 NORRAGNEWS 53 Fourth, there are a whole series of issues concerning the access to and quality of education for internally displaced people (IDPs) and for refugees. These cover lack of trained teachers, double-shift schooling, lack of security, ghett oization, language training, and lack of progression to higher education. There are larger questions about whether the poor quality of education, and the lack of access to jobs, in the fi rst host countries is itself a driver for further migration to Europe or North America. There are other, related, issues that aff ect the education and training of what might be termed externally displaced persons – people that have crossed borders involuntarily but who have, for various reasons, not registered offi cially as refugees. Fift h, the sheer scale of the Syrian crisis, on the very borders of Europe, like the Balkans before it, demands special att ention. Syria, a country with a long-standing tradition of compulsory education, now has millions of its young people out of secure, full-time schooling. There is talk of a lost generation, almost the de- schooling of Syria. NN53 reports on Supporting Syria and the Region, from the London Conference of 4th February 2016, and its implications particularly for education. REFUGEES, DISPLACED PERSONS AND EDUCATION: NEW CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPMENT AND POLICY 7 8 NORRAGNEWS 53 Foreword Kenneth King, University of Edinburgh and Editor of NORRAG News Email: [email protected] We had planned that this special issue of General for the World Humanitarian Summit, the NORRAG News on refugees would be available refugee crisis is linked to education, since half of during May 2016, the month of the fi rst-ever refugee population are children, and half of these World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on 23- are missing out on primary education (UN, 2016: 24 May 2016. ‘A Commitment to Address Forced 21). Displacement’ was understandably on its agenda for the fi rst day. Our decision also to link this migrant focus to edu- cation was primarily because the provision of edu- Also in May 2016, the Kenya Government has cation is clearly critical to the reduction of inequal- threatened to close all its refugee camps, includ- ity as well as to the promotion of mobility. These ing Dadaab, one of the largest in the world. It is are very explicitly connected in the case of global not impossible that with the offi cial start of cam- educational migration, and are a key factor in what paigning for next year’s elections a week before is termed economic migration. But the articles in the camps’ announcement, refugees are perceived this issue illustrate the crucial importance of ed- to be a factor in political outcomes. ucation in forced or involuntary migration – not as a motive to migrate but as a vital way to cope Other parallels are obvious - with the use of the with the new status of both internal and external immigrant card in current US electioneering, and displacement. of the migrant crisis by Europe’s far right parties, as well as immigration having a key place in the UK Referendum of June 23rd 2016. NORRAG’s news update NORRAG and NORRAG News have always fol- The biennial survey of NORRAG members will be lowed critically the progress of world declarations carried out in the next few months.