Refugees, Education, and Technology
By Yasmin Almeida Lobato Morais (Pardee’19)
Why we should merge them and 3 innovative ideas that have done so
Why should we care about refugee education?
I was born and raised in a developing country. Since a very early age, I started to notice that, in one given region, people may live in extremely different contexts, and have profoundly different access to opportunities and basic human rights. Access to education, for instance, is extremely unequal around the world. It is constrained by socioeconomic status, race, location, and war. Yes, war.
More than ever, children are leaving school because their hometowns are struck by conflict. Some of them have been displaced and have become refugees. According to UNESCO, 58 million children remain out of school. More than half of them live in conflict-affected settings (UNESCO, 2015). Among all refugees, only 1% of them are resettled to countries that offer them good education systems, such as the United States and Canada (UNHCR, 2016). Conflicts affecting refugees are not short-lived. In 2014, the average length of displacement for refugees was 25 years (UNHCR & Global Monitoring Report, 2016). It is clear that displacement may have numerous implications for access to education, as millions of children spend their entire childhood with limited opportunities for education.
Read the full article on Medium.
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