Corporate Engagement in Syrian Refugee Education in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey

• In Event: Public-Private Partnerships Across Geographic Contexts and Their Implications for U.S. Education Reform

Abstract

Ensuring access to quality education is particularly challenging in settings of fragility, which can include contexts of conflict or post-conflict, natural disaster, disease epidemic, or economic collapse. In such settings, given limited public funding, low government capacities or the absence of stable states, the private sector is often embraced as a necessary partner in education. This paper examines the interrelationship between fragility and private sector participation through a case study of the education of Syrian refugees.

We focus on three countries that are attempting to absorb over two million Syrian students into their school systems: Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The study is guided by the following research questions: (1) Which companies and corporate foundations are currently participating in the education of Syrian refugees? (2) What is the nature of this engagement? (3) What are the rationales behind the private sector’s involvement in the education of Syrian refugees?

Corporate actors often engage in education under the concept of “shared value,” which involves increasing profits while simultaneously helping social causes. Yet in contexts of fragility, business participation may alternatively be conceptualized as a form of “disaster capitalism,” where corporate actors exploit crises as occasions to enact market-based, neoliberal reforms. Our analysis weighs these competing conceptualizations of corporate participation in settings of crisis through the lens of Syrian refugee education.

Our research involves a case study of corporate engagement in the education of Syrian refugees. We draw from an analysis of websites, reports, and social media, in addition to 31 in-depth interviews with key informants from corporations and philanthropies, as well as their partners including civil society, bilateral government donors, and UN agencies. The study also includes a mapping of non-state sector engagement, providing a comprehensive dataset of 144 entities categorized by types of engagement, location of engagement and headquarters, and organizational mandate.

The study finds a recent surge in corporate participation in the education of Syrian refugees, where high-profile companies and foundations have launched widely-publicized educational initiatives in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. Our findings expose several areas for concern, including: insufficient coordination among companies and foundations, and between the state and non-state sectors; decontextualized interventions with an overemphasis on technology; the potential for a rise in private school establishment; the ambiguous roles of business actors in public-policy making; and tensions between humanitarian aims and profit-driven rationales for involvement.

Our findings can inform analyses of educational contexts globally, including in the United States, where settings of fragility have also seen increased business participation in education. While scholars have examined private engagement in education in post-crisis American contexts—such as New Orleans and Detroit—few have engaged with the literature on how this phenomenon similarly operates globally. The study holds significant and widely-applicable findings through raising key limitations to the assumed capacity of the private sector to understand and work within fragile contexts, and brings to light ethical questions concerning the profit-oriented motivations of businesses to engage in a crisis.

Authors

• Francine Menashy, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Zeena Zakharia, University of Massachusetts - Boston