With new research on the number of school-age children uprooted by conflict and disasters in 13 crisis-affected countries, a new report reveals the barriers they face accessing quality education and the cost of providing them with educational support.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that there were 7.1 million boys and 6.9 million girls, aged five to 17, in Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Iraq, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen at the end of 2021. The highest numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs) of school age were found in Afghanistan, the DRC, and Syria, with two million, 1.9 million, and 1.7 million, respectively.
“Internal displacement affects children’s access to education, its quality, and their learning outcomes. Despite the wide-reaching, long-lasting impacts of this challenge, there are no internationally comparable figures on IDPs’ school attendance or achievements, yet this information is vital for planning and cost-effective responses. This report takes a first step towards bridging these knowledge gaps,” said Christelle Cazabat, IDMC’s Head of Programmes.
IDMC estimates that across the 13 countries studied, the average cost of providing each displaced child with educational support for one year is between $81 – $93, depending on the country and the displacement context. This translates to an overall cost of between $1.1 – $1.3 billion for a year of education for the 14 million school-aged IDPs.
More than nine million internally displaced children could be at risk of missing out on an education because resource constraints and insufficient funding meant that they did not receive support through humanitarian response plans in 2021. Access to education varies depending on a displaced child’s gender, disability status, and other characteristics. For example, current trends suggest that only one in three girls in crisis-affected countries will have completed secondary education by 2030.
“Internally displaced people, of all ages, are largely unaccounted for compared with refugees and migrants, and little data of any kind is disaggregated by age, making internally displaced children twice invisible,” said Christelle Cazabat.
Governments are primarily responsible for the provision of IDPs’ education and related data collection, but support from the international community is often necessary. Promising guidance, tools, and initiatives are emerging to improve the quality, interoperability, and sharing of such data, yet more resources are needed to safely identify and monitor IDPs systematically.