Thank you.
My organization, WUSC, works to expand education and employment opportunities for marginalized youth, and has a strong presence in Iraq, in Jordan, in the refugee camps and host communities of northern Kenya and northern Uganda, and in South Sudan. In all of these places, we have been working with local institutions to foster better quality education and employment outcomes for girls, young women and refugees. As in Canada, all of these young people have been affected by the pandemic with the closure of schools and a marked decrease in local economic activities and employment opportunities.
In these circumstances, refugee and out-of-school girls are particularly vulnerable to significant learning losses and to the lost social protection that schools often provide. Our current concern is that many of these young people will not return to class as schools open, and that those who do so will not receive the support they need to catch up and stay in school. This will result in higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, early marriage and depressed future incomes.
Indeed, we are already seeing a significant decline in the return rates of girls to now-open schools in the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya where we work.
Refugees and their host communities have not been passive in this context. Instead, they have been part of the response to the education crisis that COVID has caused and should form an important part of the longer-term solution. For example, we witnessed many instances of refugee and host communities undertaking door-to-door campaigns to identify vulnerable students and organizing peer support learning clubs and ed-tech sharing groups—all initiatives that have prevented some dropouts and learning losses, provided some ongoing social protection and, perhaps most importantly, helped to sustain a sense of hope amongst these vulnerable youth.
These efforts are unfortunately under-recognized, undervalued and under-supported by governments and the international development community. This is incredibly short-sighted, as these kinds of refugee-led initiatives are an essential complement to the other investments in teacher education, smaller classroom sizes and the integration of education technology in remote classrooms and communities, all of which need to happen.
In this context, the government's recently announced “together for learning” campaign, which seeks to mount an international effort to ensure that all refugee and displaced children and youth have access to the education they need and deserve is well-timed. However, to realize this campaign's potential and meet the increased needs of vulnerable youth and children caused by COVID, the government really needs to ensure sufficient and consistent funding, in part by investing in innovative approaches that support refugee-led responses to the education challenges that they face. Now really is the time to invest.
I will conclude my remarks with two recommendations.
First, the government has already committed to allocate no less than 10% of Canada's international assistance budget to education, but to education broadly. Now is the time to further focus these resources to direct a significant percentage of this commitment to the “together for learning” campaign, recognizing that refugee education has not received the level of support that it deserves in Canada's international development efforts.
Second, the government should create a fund directly to support refugee voices, leadership, organizations and responses in the education sector. This could be modelled on the equality fund, which the government helped to create in 2019 to permanently change the model of support to women's rights organizations. Similarly, a fund to permanently change the model of support to refugee-led organizations and responses would address a critical gap in the global refugee support architecture. It could form an important new instrument in Canada's international development tool kit and become a pillar of the “together for learning” campaign.