Journal on Education in Emergencies Volume 8, Number 2

This special issue of JEiE offers new insights into the gendered experiences of girls and boys seeking quality education in contexts of conflict and crisis. The featured authors demonstrate the role scholarly and practice-based evidence can play in keeping education systems and providers accountable for gender parity in education access and quality for children and youth affected by emergencies.

Carine Allaf, Julia Dicum, and Ruth Naylor, the lead editors of this Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies, reflect on the key questions that shaped the scope and development of this issue and summarize the learning presented in each article.

Drawing from teacher and student focus group discussions in 11 urban public school contexts, authors Kathy Bickmore and Najme Kishani Farahani find that GBV is a shared concern, but that curricula and classroom practices don’t sufficiently address the issue or create space for transforming local experiences of gender conflict as a way to support sustainable peace.

Nicola Jones and coauthors share insights they gained from 3,030 student surveys and 40 key informant interviews on the compounding effects COVID-19 has had on existing legal and cultural barriers to education access for Rohingya and Syrian refugees. They specifically note the exacerbating effects the pandemic has had on girls’ enrollment.

In a study of ten countries, Nicole Dulieu, Silvia Arlini, Mya Gordon, and Allyson Krupar suggest that displaced boys who reported learning “nothing” or “a little bit” during COVID-19 school closures tied these perceptions to feeling sad or worried, and to increased violence at home. Girls more often connected their feelings about learning less during COVID with material and economic barriers.

Flora Cohen, Sarah R. Meyer, Ilana Seff, Cyril Bennouna, Carine Allaf, and Lindsay Stark detail how intersecting gender and race identities, resettlement status, prior experiences, and parental expectations created a different route to gendered socialization for adolescent girls and boys from Iraq in education spaces in Virginia and Texas than for their US-born counterparts.

Shelby Carvalho conducted regression analyses of factors that affect refugee girls’ and boys’ access to secondary school, and that of refugee girls and girls living in nearby host communities in Ethiopia. She found that refugee girls seeking secondary education are more disadvantaged than their male or host-community peers by domestic responsibilities and the perceived safety of the community.

In this field note, Abdul Badi Sayibu considers the phone-based surveys that Plan International used to assess the reach of and participation in its Making Ghanaian Girls Great Program. He suggests this is a viable method for collecting sex-disaggregated data in vulnerable and hard-to-reach contexts, and for facilitating rapid analyses of data for EiE program decisionmaking.

In her review of UNESCO’s GEMR Gender Report 2019 and INEE’s Mind the Gap report, Nora Fyles comments on the status of the evidence base on girls’ education and the progress the EiE field has made in responding to the ambitions of the 2018 Charlevoix Declaration.

In her review of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Laila Kadiwal comments on why an EiE audience will be interested in author Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s historical analysis and efforts to dismantle monolithic understandings of Muslim women and girls seeking an education.

In her review of Borderless Higher Education for Refugees, edited by Wenona Giles and Lorrie Miller, Spogmai Akseer affirms the contributing authors’ argument for increasing access to college and university education for refugees. Higher education is a tool for navigating and overcoming the systems of inequality and the social, political, and economic barriers refugees face.