World Refugee Day: a Call to Action

Today, on June 20th, 2019, we recognize World Refugee Day (WRD). WRD presents an opportunity to shed light on the growing refugee crisis and celebrate the resilience of those locked in increasingly protracted displacement crises. Yet, without adequate funding and institutional investments, these are simply words. It is imperative that funding and institutional investment match the scale of the crisis.

For refugee students, education is more than facts, pens, and papers. Education protects; education fosters resilience; and education provides a buttress of normalcy in extraordinary circumstances. Beyond the immediate benefits to security, safety, and mental health, every year of education decreases the chance of further conflict by roughly 20%. Most refugees, however, never make it to secondary school, and less than 1% will see the inside of a university.

"With education,” echoes a thirteen-year old boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “I think I will have a future that won’t involve guns and fighting, that is my dream, that I can look into my future and see that I have options and choices. Without school you have no choices in life, you are just trying to survive.”

And far too many refugee children are without options.

Among refugee children, only 61% of primary school-aged children are enrolled in school, and only 23% will continue into secondary school. Both enrollment rates stagnate well below global averages. With 70.8 million individuals displaced from their homes — 25.4 million of which beyond the borders of their country — and the growing destructive consequences of climate catastrophes, displacement will be one of the defining crises of the 21st century.

However, displacement is not a crisis of numbers. It is a crisis of fundamental human rights, with immediate and lasting human consequences. As scholars and practitioners have argued, education should not be a secondary consideration. It should be immediate, and extend throughout all phases of a crisis. It should be provided in the same influx of humanitarian aid that brings food rations and clean water.

“You can’t just bring food and forget about education,” explained a father from the DRC, “as people we are more than what we eat.”

On World Refugee Day, and every other day, INEE, our members, and our partners work to ensure refugees and IDPs are provided with the educational opportunities they deserve. To that end, www.inee.org provides a wide variety of resources developed for supporting those working to overcome these challenges. Our forced displacement and accelerated education collections contain a wide-variety of expert-vetted and carefully curated resources designed to support the realization of this goal.

These efforts, however, fall short of the enormous global effort necessitated by the crisis. While EiE funding requests have increased by 21% over the past 5 years, investment in EiE hovered at 2.7% of Humanitarian Aid, well below what is required. This World Refugee Day, let us continue to celebrate the resilience of the world’s growing population living in displacement, and continue to push for solutions and investment commensurate with the scale of the crisis.