Refugees, Displaced Persons and Education: New Challenges for Development and Policy
NORRAG News #53

Refugees, Displaced Persons and Education: New Challenges for Development and Policy

May 2016

When the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report (GMR) of 2011 focused on The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education, its emphasis was not principally with refugees but rather with the deleterious effect of conflict on education. Though the state of affairs has not been hidden for those states neighboring conflict, the European refugee crisis has only recently made the situation more visible for Europe’s population. The World Economic Forum (WEF) of 2016 argued that at the ‘top of the list of risks of highest concern… by a considerable margin, was large-scale involuntary migration’. Put another way, migration’s sudden impact on the front-line states of Europe and on the main European destinations, Germany and Sweden, has brought into the open and into focus the millions of refugees already located in refugee camps and in host communities in countries surrounding Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Palestine etc. Consequently, the great burden of support for refugees and displaced persons has been long carried by countries of the Global South, with the assistance of the international relief agencies.

This issue of NORRAG News draws attention to the many different dimensions of refugees, displaced persons and education. The emphasis is not focused on economic migration or on migration for higher education per se, but rather on what the WEF calls ‘involuntary migration’ and its connections with education. 

Contents include: 

  • Editorials 
  • New Challenges for Development and Humanitarian Aid
  • Education, Skills and Forced Migration: Thematic Priorities 
  • Regional Lenses on the Global Politics of Involuntary Migration
  • A Special Focus on Syria and its Neighbours 
  • Refugees and Education: Evidence, What Works, and Planning

Selected articles from this issue have been translated into Arabic by the Ministry of Higher Education of the Sultanate of Oman and Chinese Mandarin by the Institute of International and Comparative Education at Zhejiang Normal University, China. In addition, a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa is available in French. These articles were developed in collaboration with AREB.