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NORGLOBAL2-Norge - global partner

EducAid: Improving education for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in Bangladesh

Alternative title: EducAid: Hvordan bedre utdanning for Rohingya-flyktninger fra Myanmar som bor i Bangladesh

Awarded: NOK 6.0 mill.

What are the education opportunities for Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh? What barriers do Rohingya refugee children face in accessing quality education? How can education programs help young Rohingya refugees to learn and to successfully deal with the socio-economic and psycho-social effects of forced displacement? These are questions that the EducAid project aimed to address. The Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the worst and largest forced displacement situations in the world. Rohingya refugee children are facing an education crisis, given that many of them lack access to basic education. The EducAid project aimed to systematically identify education barriers for Rohingya refugee children, map the education opportunities, and collect information on education needs and desires through a large survey of adult Rohingya refugees and host community members as well as in-depth interviews with young Rohingya refugees and key stakeholders in education programming. Furthermore, the project investigated the educational impact of Covid-19 for refugee and host community children. The Government of Bangladesh prohibits Rohingya refugees from accessing formal education. Since refugees cannot access formal education, many non-government organizations are providing non-formal education programs in the refugee camps in southern Bangladesh. Through fieldwork and qualitative interviews the EducAid project explored the impact of various types of education among refugees and host community children. In particular we would highlight the finding about the importance of the education grassroot initiatives started by the refugees themselves, which seem to be widely seen as the most valuable and useful education service available to refugees (and preferred over the NGO learning centers) in the absence of access to formal education. The project has furthermore collected unique data on refugee legislation globally, which shows that Bangladesh is among the top 5 most restrictive countries in the world when it comes to regulation of refugee education. The conflictual interests between refugees, humanitarian organizations and the host government, and how these conflictual interests impact programming, became one of the project’s key research foci. We have mapped the various types of education services available to refugees and host communities, and to our knowledge this is the first mapping of this type. As a valuable addition to the initial aim, we also decided to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the access to various education services. However, Bangladesh had about the longest school closures in the world (more than 18 months in total), which led to significant delays and changes of our original plans. For example, our large physical household survey of refugees and hosts was delayed more than two years. In the meantime, we conducted a series of shorter phone surveys. Two particular findings stand out from the combined survey data: 1) Although access to education services for both refugees and the host community declined drastically during the pandemic, the refugee households on average made use of a higher number of different learning substitutes (religious learning facilities, community based schools and private tutors) than the host community households. 2) Among refugee children, there was a dramatic drop in teenage girls’ attendance at NGO learning centres relative to before the pandemic. The already low attendance rate among young Rohingya girls fell 30% after the pandemic compared to before the closures. During the pandemic, we also partnered with local refugee research assistants who helped collect qualitative data on informal education networks in the camps during COVID-19, including the use of online teaching. This is documented in various reports and policy briefs and has been discussed with various actors in both Bangladesh and Norway. In 2022 we also collaborated with a group of 15 Rohingya refugees and conducted a workshop with two video journalists who trained them video journalism, source criticism and journalistic principles. This resulted in 6 short films on educational challenges and aspirations. Towards the end of the project, in November 2022, the PRIO team travelled to Bangladesh to conduct some final fieldwork and disseminate our findings to various stakeholders from the education sector in Cox’s Bazaar. We also co-hosted a workshop together with IPA in Dhaka with some 30 participants from both academia and the policy community. We hosted a final event in Oslo presenting our findings to a broad audience.

EducAid has produced findings that have been widely disseminated to and discussed with various target groups. To the key user groups (e.g. Rohingya youth, women’s organizations, NGOs, local leaders, refugee teachers, NGOs) this has been obtained through focus groups, interviews and meetings. We believe the project has contributed to raise awareness about the overall education situation in and outside the camps, the impact of Covid-19, aspects of inclusive quality education,– in particular with regard to young Rohingya girls, and what takes for them to participate in education programs. More concretely, a report from this project, on refugee-led education initiatives in the camps received both media attention and also led to the first meetings between the education sector (the large NGOs) and the refugee teachers on the ground. Following recommendations from our research and consultation meetings in Cox’s Bazar and Dhaka in 2019, UNICEF and the Education Sector in Cox’s Bazar adopted a new policy, which led to a pilot introducing the use of Myanmar Curriculum for 10 000 refugee children. A scale-up of the pilot started up in the second half of 2022. Project outcomes for policymakers (e.g. the MFA and Norad) and practitioners (e.g. the education partners both in Norway, Bangladesh and beyond, such as UNICEF, save the Children, BRAC, NRC etc.) include facilitating a better understanding of the needs on the ground, the systematic gender inequalities in terms of access to education, and promising grassroot initiatives by the refugees themselves that seem to improve the educational opportunities for Rohingya children and youth. This knowledge-sharing has been obtained mainly through stakeholder- and policy meetings. The project has contributed to increased understanding of the education crisis for Rohingya refugees through dissemination in the media, social media, and public events. In terms of more long-term impact, the issue of education in emergencies is already high on the political agenda of states and international organizations concerned with development issues. Yet, we hope that the EducAid project will aid in generating more attention to the Rohingya situation and the topic of refugee education in particular. Hopefully, in the longer run, the results from the project could also be used to try to convince the Bangladeshi government to reconsider some of the current restrictions on education for refugees (such as lifting the ban on private education in the camps). Concrete, evidence-based policy recommendations from EducAid on how to improve the quality of education for Rohingya refugees (such as facilitating online learning, allowing private teaching in the camps and ensuring sufficient salary for the refugee teachers) speaks directly to SDG#4: ensuring access to equitable, quality education for all. Improvement on this sustainable development goal will ultimately increase the progress towards all the other sustainable development goals.

Forced displacement represents a major barrier to achieving Sustainable Development Goal #4, ensuring inclusive and quality education for all. This project examines the role of quality education in mitigating the negative educational, socio-economic, and psycho-social effects of forced displacement, with a focus on the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. The Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the worst forced displacement situations and the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. Rohingya refugee children are also facing an education crisis: Access to education was restricted in Myanmar, while education programs are currently serving only few Rohingya refugee children living in camps. We therefore propose an inter-disciplinary, mixed methods project to improve knowledge about 1) whether and how education is contributing to mitigating the effects of forced displacement by comparing in-camp, out-of-camp, and host populations, and 2) how to improve the quality of education programs for conflict-affected populations. The project will generate evidence-based policy recommendations about how to improve the quality of education in situations of conflict and humanitarian crisis. We will do this by mapping the landscape of education programs for Rohingya refugees; conducting a survey with refugees of their education needs, preferences, and expectations; and collecting in-depth qualitative data. We will use innovative dissemination methods to communicate the project’s findings, including producing a short documentary film about the process of establishing education programs in the camps, the role of education in helping Rohingya refugees to cope with and overcome the effects of forced displacement, and the views of refugees on how education programs are addressing their needs, preferences, and expectations.

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NORGLOBAL2-Norge - global partner