George teaches in a double-shift school in a refugee camp in Kenya to increase access to education

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

kenya 1]Low and middle income countries hosted about 89% of all refugees in 2017. About 52% of all refugees are under the age of 18. About 40% live in managed camps or collective centres, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Displacement intensifies the usual pressures on teacher management systems. Coordination of teacher recruitment, compensation and development is often further compromised in fragile contexts where multiple humanitarian and development aid agencies operate under different rules.

George, who spoke at the launch event for the 2019 GEM Report in Nairobi, Kenya, works in a secondary school in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp. In his camp, a ‘two-schools-in-one’ approach was tried out to help make up for the lack of secondary schools. Two sets of students attend, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, each covering the 8 lessons a day as required for the curriculum. Each have their own deputy principle, heads of departments, teachers and different uniform. It has been such a success it has now been copied in three other schools, and the number of students enrolled has gone up.

The two-schools-in-one was to solve congestion in classes. However, the congestion problem has not been resolved. This is because next year, over 6000 students will be competing for 2500 spaces in the five secondary schools in Kakuma Refugee Camp. More classes need to be constructed. Because of access to education, students acquire skills of peaceful living and conflict resolution, which is important for reconstructing their mother countries.”

In Kenyan refugee camps, schools must comply with Ministry of Education minimum standards. Yet in the Dadaab refugee camp, there were 120 pupils per teacher in pre-primary, and 56 per teacher in primary. Only 8% of primary teachers had national certification, and 6 out of 10 refugee teachers were untrained. On average, six students shared a desk.

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In December 2017, the education ministers of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda committed in the Djibouti Declaration to ‘integrate education for refugees and returnees into National Education Sector Plans by 2020’.

Recommendation: Displaced people need to be included in national education systems. This should be through multi-year education sector planning with adequate budgetary provision. With most displaced people being hosted in low or middle income countries, wealthy countries need to offer adequate financial and technical support to ensure the right to education for all displaced people within a few months of displacement.

Please download and share the youth report

Youth can use it to inform their campaigns and advocacy, while the stories can teach about the education status and challenges of your peers around the globe.

Teachers can use it as a classroom aid/pedagogical tool to discuss key issues on migration and displacement around the world, taking each story in turn, discussing the context, the implications, and the solutions.

Actions you can take to support the Youth report recommendations include:

  1. Tweet the stories and recommendations in the Report using the hashtag #EducationOnTheMove
  2. Find more stories and associated calls for change on the campaign homepage
  3. Share your own story of what it’s like accessing education when on the move via the campaign homepage and help us raise awareness of the issues needing attention
  4. Work up an advocacy campaign around one of the recommendations, sharing the key facts, stats and calls for change with youth networks, the media and at events.
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