U.N hails Uganda, Chad for integrating refugee pupils

The United Nations has hailed Uganda and Chad for educating refugees in national schools to help them integrate.

It said more countries should emulate this example.

Uganda hosts the largest number of refugees in Africa at 1.4 million. This year, the East African nation brought humanitarian and development agencies together to create mixed schools for refugees and host communities, the UN said.

Chad, on the other hand hosts 450,000 refugees and has developed a temporary education plan for refugees, while it adapts the national system to include them. The UN’s cultural agency (UNESCO) said, it is a first in Africa.

UNESCO said, about 4 million child refugees were out of school in 2017, meaning they did not only loose their right to education, but host nations, also missed a chance to integrate people from different communities.

According to UNESCO, wars, persecution and other violence drove a record 68.5 million people from their homes in 2017, the majority uprooted inside their own countries while 25 million were refugees.

Experts say, education remains a low priority in many places where people have fled conflict.

In 2016, world leaders agreed in New York to ensure that all refugee and migrant children receive education within a few months of arrival in a host country.

But asylum-seeking children in Australia have limited access to education, Rohingya in Bangladesh can only attend separate, non-formal schools, and many refugees in Africa are confined to camps, making it harder to get jobs afterwards, UNESCO said.

Manos Antoninis, Director of UNESCO’s annual Global Education Monitoring Report, ‘‘hopes that in the future governments all over the world will be more reluctant to exclude refugees and put them in separate schools’‘.