Forced Displacement

Migrant and forcibly displaced children and youth can face specific barriers in accessing education related to their migration and legal status and their right to and support for socio-economic inclusion. A full definition of forced displacement is available in the EiE Glossary.

At the end of 2023, 117.3 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events seriously disturbing public order. This equates to more than 1 in every 29 people on Earth - nearly double the 1 in 125 people who were displaced a decade ago (UNHCR).

Migrant

The current global estimate is that there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020, which equates to 3.6 percent of the global population.

Internally displaced person (IDP)

By the end of 2023, there were between 68.3 million internally displaced people. IDPs account for 58% of the forcibly displaced population globally.

Stateless person

In total, UNHCR reports 4.4 million stateless people. About 1.3 million stateless people worldwide are also displaced. Most of them are Rohingya, either internally displaced in Myanmar or refugees, mostly in neighbouring countries. (These 1.3 million are only counted as forcibly displaced when calculating the total population that UNHCR protects and/or assists to avoid double counting).

Returnee

6.2 million displaced people returned to their areas or countries of origin in 2023, including 5.1 million internally displaced people and 1.1 million refugees (UNHCR).

Barriers to refugees and asylum seekers’ education are dealt with in a separate collection which is specifically on forced displacement across borders. 

Forced Displacement and Education

Migration and displacement interact with education in many ways. Lack of access to inclusive and equitable education and the quality of education affect those who move, those who stay, those who return and those who host immigrants, refugees or other displaced populations. 

Internal migration mainly affects many rapidly urbanizing middle income countries, such as China, where more than one in three rural children are left behind by migrating parents. International migration mainly affects high income countries, where immigrants make up at least 15% of the student population in half of schools. It also affects sending countries: more than one in four countries witness at least one-fifth of their skilled nationals emigrating.

Displacement mainly affects low income countries, which host 10% of the global population but 20% of the global refugee population, often in their most educationally deprived areas. More than half of those forcibly displaced are under age 18.

Teachers have to deal with multilingual classrooms; language barriers for these children and youth is often a major obstacle in accessing and succeeding in education. Trauma affecting migrant and displaced students and the impact it has on their education, the challenge of recognition of qualifications and prior learning (GEM Report, 2019) are other major obstacles. Additionally children and youth from these groups frequently suffer discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity, religion or simply being displaced/migrants/refugees.

In spite of the differences in terms of legal status for all of these groups (migrants, IDP’s, stateless and returnees) and the different reasons for leaving their country of origin, the barriers to education are often similar. Moreover, monitoring access to education for these groups is a barrier in itself, given the difficulties in collecting data disaggregated by migration and displacement status.