Effects of Teacher Training for Refugee Women in West Africa

This paper draws data from an innovative research project tracing former refugee teachers who received teacher training from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) over a seventeen year long education program in refugee camps in Guinea (1991-2008). The research was conducted from January to May of 2009 by Shepler and a team of West African research assistants,2 and traced repatriated refugee teachers who had returned to their homes in Sierra Leone and Liberia in an effort to determine the effects of the training they received —particularly whether they were still working as teachers in their post-repatriation lives, or whether they had made use of their training in other ways. Although the research in question focused on all of the former IRC teachers who the research team could trace, the present paper is about the female teachers and their specific situations. Focusing on the women’s responses yields gender-specific conclusions about structural barriers to institutional and societal change in conflict and post-conflict settings.

To highlight the importance of training and employing female teachers, the paper will review some of the literature on the relationship between girls’ educational success and the presence of female teachers. While this literature is not focused specifically on conflict or post-conflict settings, many of the social, cultural, and economic issues related to girls’ education and female teachers span the continuum between emergency relief and development. Following the literature review, we provide relevant background information on IRC’s refugee education program in Guinea and the tracer study on long- term effects of teacher training. We then turn to the gender analysis of the results of that study, and finally suggest some conclusions about structure and agency related to female refugees and teachers.