Learning Never Stops: Paving The Way for Inclusive Education For All Children
On this International Day of Education, we join UNESCO’s call and dedicate our focus to Afghan girls and women. Around the world, over 3M refugee and displaced children are out of school. In Afghanistan where education has become a distant dream for many school-age children. Children passionate to learn and improve their lives often seek non-formal solutions to keep learning, despite the many challenges. We offer some recommendations based on our research.
By Tanya Kathuria, Maureen Park, Devyani Nighoskar, Nassim Majidi
“A classroom is a good place because we learn new things there. We learn how to read and write. We are in the classroom from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm and study. I go to the city to work after my class ends. I am very happy with my classmates when I am in the classroom. In this school, girls and boys study separately, and my sister is happy that she goes to school.”
— Raza* (13), Internally Displaced Person; Afghanistan
Raza and his sister study and work, and find happiness in the classroom. However, our study with WarChild highlights that they are the exception, when millions of other internally displaced children are out of school.
There are 244 million children out of school who wish to complete their education and achieve their dreams. Already children know education will determine their life’s decisions, their interactions with people, and the adults they will become. Most of us find our life’s passions through schooling, which feeds our eagerness to learn. It teaches us how to navigate our households, our careers, and the obstacles of daily life. It offers all of that and more for the displaced — for whom education is a bridge between places, cultures, and times in their lives that have been otherwise fragmented and fractured. Education is synonymous with language training, cultural orientation, and psychosocial care, which their own parents may not be able to provide them with.
In Afghanistan, 2.5 million (80%) of school-aged Afghan girls and young women are out of school, following the decision of the de facto authorities to ban education for girls above grade 6. Moreover, researchers believe that the recent ban on women in universities is likely to be the “last straw” for the majority of private institutions, as it has reduced funding for several universities, who are now finding it difficult to pay their teachers and professors. This has impacted the overall state of education in the country.
Beyond Afghanistan, multiple factors including protracted conflict, displacement, and COVID-19 school closures have resulted in large gaps in education and extensive learning loss around the world. Some young students merely lack access to a school. Others must weigh the expense of food, having a roof over their heads, or keeping the lights on at home against the cost of books, stationery, transportation, and fees. Evidence suggests that the obstacles preventing refugee children from obtaining education get harder to overcome as they get older.
How are displaced children and children on the move coping with inaccessibility to education?
Despite limited access to formal education, our research in Afghanistan has found that displaced girls and boys use informal means of education to continue learning, and to do so in a protected and safe space. These include studying in madrasas, mosques, brothers tutoring their sisters at home, and literacy classes for girls and young women. These informal learning methods and safe spaces offer starting points for humanitarian actors to build upon existing initiatives and bridge learning gaps.
“We don’t have any proper place for studying. The place that makes my life better is the mosque because I am not allowed to go to school. I can learn something by studying in the mosque as the people think the mosque is much more secure and safe for girls. The girls go to the mosque to learn Namaz and Holy Quran”
— Nazifa*, Internally Displaced Person (IDP); Afghanistan
We came across similar coping mechanisms to access education beyond Afghanistan, and have seen other contexts where children on the move can no longer access formal education yet find ways to learn and teach others.
A recent study by Samuel Hall on girls and migration in Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya found that many boys and girls on the move interviewed had not had any formal education or had dropped out of school. While for boys, schooling access was limited by a need to begin working to support their families, for girls it was most likely to be driven by social norms.
The desire to pursue education was a major factor in girls’ decisions to migrate. Some girls described excelling in school in their countries of origin, but being pressured to quit, most often to get married, but sometimes to provide financial support for their families.
“My decision to leave my country is because my uncle was pressuring me to get married with an older man but all I wanted was to continue going to school. I had to stop going to school. I met a friend who had the same issue of forced marriage. She advised me to leave. She said, ‘we can have our freedom, we can go to school’. So I took my friends’ advice to leave for a country where no one would be hurt”.
— Sabana*, Child refugee, Morocco
Some resorted to other means, including one young woman who studied each night after work, teaching herself using the textbooks of her employer’s children.
In all these examples, for girls and women to access education, they must feel protected and safe, in a space and a community that understands and accepts them.
What kind of education programmes do displaced children need?
Moving beyond static conceptualisations of community-based education
Education systems must be responsive and resilient to crises and political changes. Displacement settings call for more flexibility and space for education to be implemented through non-formal means especially in areas like Afghanistan where the link between local and central educational structures has been broken.
Researchers have shown the success of community-based schools in absorbing out of school students, in both rural and urban areas of Afghanistan. These structures exist, alongside the trust and relationships that have sustained them. Lessons learned from Afghanistan highlight the need to invest in local structures, trust and relations that will sustain girls’ education, despite it being banned nationally. The women shuras (consultative councils) in Afghanistan can be used as a platform to impart non-formal education. While investing in aid, it is important to recognise the cultural differences, challenges and opportunities of employing solutions in Afghanistan.
This means maintaining:
- Safe and secure community-based education
- Education programmes within mosques that engage with girls
- Informal and child-friendly spaces for schooling
- Recreational spaces and schooling
- Connections between community and education
We have learned from other contexts, the need to focus on the implementation and reinforcement of alternative opportunities for education such as the implementation of a competency-based curriculum (CBC) approach or Instant Network Schools (INS) for displaced children who have been out of school or are continuing to engage in work. In a study conducted by Samuel Hall in Mozambique, it was found that these schools can help improve the quality of education in some of the most marginalised communities.
We also need to consider children’s learning ecosystems. For example, young girls are often discouraged to pursue education in certain households, and there can be limited stakeholder buy-in for new, innovative approaches. In order to implement initiatives like building capacities of teachers and school administrators or INS, it is important to also create awareness amongst parents/guardians and stakeholders and also consider barriers to access — such as lack of smartphones, laptops, tech literacy and devise ways in which these could be overcome.
Moving Forward: Key Solutions for Afghanistan
‘All the schools must be reopened for the girls, and be financially supported by foreign countries if our country is to survive this crucial moment. If schools are not open at home, the number of scholarships abroad for girls must be increased for them to study in private schools and abroad. The only way to solve all available problems is to have an educated society’, says Fatima,*
Ceri Oeppen and Tahir Zaman (Co-Directors of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research), in their article for Migration Policy Practice’s special issue on Afghanistan highlight education as a protective pathway for a number of women in the region. Student visas and scholarships with integration support and resettlement-based refugee sponsorship schemes are some of the ways that can be expanded through coordinated, multi-stakeholder approaches.
Similarly, Christopher Nyamandi (Save the Children) highlights in the same special issue the need to explore existing donor mechanisms that can be used to maintain educational activities within Afghanistan. This can be adapted to the needs of displaced children living within camps, and can help further prevent children from dropping out of school.
Investments are needed — if there is no formal, national education system, then investing in informal, community-based systems that can maintain the aspirations, hopes and dreams of an entire country.
Afghanistan — and the world — cannot sustain any other alternative. We need to continue showing the impact of the ban on education for children and women in Afghanistan. Building on UNESCO’s interventions to support the continuity of education, data can be a tool for advocacy for investments into culturally appropriate, and context-specific programmes. As UNICEF estimates that the ban on girls’ education has cost the country, in the last year alone, $500 million dollars, UNDP also forecasts that restricting women from working will result in an economic loss of over $1 billion, reducing Afghanistan’s GDP further by 5 percent.
- Names have been changed to protect identity.
