• Education for refugees

Education for refugees

This paper looks at the barriers internally displaced children face in accessing education. It states that often education is treated as a secondary need, to be addressed only once conflicts have subsided. However, this leaves many IDP children to grow up without education as well as deprived of the protection and support that going to school can provide.

The paper suggests a number of steps to be taken to overcome certain barriers. These include:

• prioritising education for IDPs, at the earliest stages of emergencies, including by systematically providing interim educational services, such as "school in a box" kits and mobile educational programming, in IDP camps and settlements
• issuing IDPs who have lost their documentation with temporary documentation so that they can register for school without having to return to their areas of origin
• advocating for the abolition of school fees at the elementary and secondary levels so that impoverished children are not turned away
• ensuring that IDPs have access to education in a language they understand
• taking special measures to facilitate the school attendance of displaced girls, for example by supplying them with clothing, soap and sanitary material, building separate latrines, providing childcare opportunities for adolescent mothers, as well as by hiring female teachers
• providing alternative schooling or skills-training programs for IDP children and adolescents whose household or economic obligations impede regular school attendance
• establishing scholarship programmes to help fund education, including higher education, for IDP students, building on examples of such initiatives for refugee children and adolescents.

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