Promoting Gender Equality in Refugee Camps

• In Event: Micro- and macro-level opportunities for and barriers to girls’ education: practitioner perspectives on achieving sustainable development goals 4 and 5

Proposal

World University Service of Canada (WUSC) is a leading Canadian international development organization working in education, economic opportunities, and empowerment. WUSC has been working on girls’ education issues in refugee camps and surrounding host communities in Northern Kenya since 2009, including with our Kenya Equity in Education Project (KEEP). KEEP II creates conditions for learning that will allow approximately 25,000 marginalized girls to stay in school as long as possible, be safe and supported at school and at home, and make successful transitions at critical life stages. In this paper, we use WUSC’s experiences working on issues of girls’ education in refugee camps to draw lessons and insights relevant to policy and practice at micro and macro levels with respect to the achievement of SDGs 4 and 5.

Girls and young women face a number of significant micro-level barriers to accessing education, the most prevalent of which are poverty, gender-based violence including early forced marriage and unsafe classrooms, and socio-cultural attitudes toward girls’ education and empowerment. At the macro-level, national policies surrounding right to mobility and right to work for refugees have an effect on access to education at lower levels. In refugee camps, where employment prospects are limited, families anticipate a low “return on investment” from the costs of supporting a girl’s education. Girls themselves may have limited motivation to stay in school. Tangible opportunities for employment or higher education can make a significant difference as a “pull factor” for girls to remain in school.

All over the world –whether low-income, middle-income or humanitarian contexts—girls face many of the same micro-level barriers to accessing education. One of the fundamental differences in the protracted refugee contexts where WUSC works is the profound lack of hope and opportunity that affects girls’ motivation. Many girls WUSC speaks with have referred to the camps as “open prisons” where they feel that they have no hope for their futures.

Multi-sectoral approaches to promote gender equality and girls’ education are critical; access to health services, clean water, and many other types of services have a significant impact on girls’ ability to access education. Effective multi-sectoral approaches are challenging to implement sustainably, as they hinge on robust and transparent government and NGO coordination, as well as flexibility in allocation and duration of funding commitments to meet unaddressed needs.

There is a wealth of research and data available on the barriers that girls and young women face to accessing education, including in humanitarian contexts. While it is critical to continue ensuring that we have updated research, the knowledge that is most critical and useful to practitioners is highly granular information about our target populations. Detailed data about beliefs, cultural traditions, and everyday practices can help practitioners to better understand and transform harmful social norms. Renewed investment in high-quality, rigorous monitoring and evaluation and gender analysis at the project level can help address these gaps.

From the perspective of an organization such as WUSC, which works on education issues primarily in refugee contexts, it is critical that the G7 Agenda and SDGs continue to highlight the distinct challenges faced by children experiencing displacement. The links between the G7 Agenda and the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, for example, provide an opportunity for a more globally coordinated response.

Author

• Stephanie McBride, World University Service of Canada (WUSC)