Accelerated Education as a catalyst for migrant and refugee integration in Latin America

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In line with CIES 2024 “the Power of Protest”, accelerated education (AE) shows that “another world is possible” for migrant and refugee children and youth in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). AE provides access to flexible education programs that enable more inclusive educational futures. AE facilitates the completion of educational pathways and supports integration into the host country not only for individuals but also for their communities. AEPs provide a flexible, inclusive alternative to the formal system for overage children and youth, reducing drop-out rates and providing a pathway into formal education / certification, preventing further exclusion of already marginalized communities and exemplifying how education can be a catalyst for change in society in terms of inclusion of migrants and refugees.

With an exodus of more than 7 million people since 2015, Venezuela’s refugee crisis is the second-largest external displacement crisis in the world after Syria and the largest in LAC. LAC hosts the largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees, with a figure exceeding 6 million people. In addition, after the COVID-19 pandemic in LAC, it is estimated that at least 55% to 71% of learners have learning deficiencies, affecting migrant and refugee children and youth to a greater extent.

Among the different challenges faced by refugee and migrant children and youth when entering a new school in the host country is that many are overage, which occurs when a student is older than the traditional school age for his or her grade level. For example, according to the Interagency Group on Mixed Migratory Flows (GIFMM), in 2021, 22% of Venezuelan students in Colombia were overage, as opposed to only 6% of Colombian children and youth. Migration directly corresponds to overage because the time spent migrating causes children and youth’s education to be interrupted and because they can face difficulties accessing the educational system in the host country.

In this regard, learners being overage can affect the social and economic integration of Venezuelan children and youth and their families into host communities. It is more probable that students who are overage will be ridiculed, a situation which, for migrants and refugees, may be further aggravated by xenophobia and discrimination. Thus, the problem of overage learners, combined with acts of discrimination, increases the possibility that migrant and refugee students will drop out of school.

This situation underlines the importance of formulating strategies to integrate Venezuelan children and youth in education, not only by improving their access to the education system, but also by increasing the use of relevant educational models, such as accelerated education programs (AEPs) that respond to refugee and migrants’ needs and circumstances. According to INEE, Accelerated Education (AE) is a flexible, age-appropriate program, run in an accelerated time frame, which aims to provide access to education for disadvantaged, over-age, out-of-school children and youth. This may include those who missed out on, or had their education interrupted by, poverty, marginalization, conflict, and crisis. The goal of AEPs is to provide learners with equivalent, certified competencies for basic education using effective teaching and learning approaches that match their level of cognitive maturity.

This panel will present how accelerated education programs have contributed to equity in education and have helped integrate migrant and refugee students in their host country.

A representative of Juntos Aprendemos, a USAID funded initiative in Colombia that seeks to increase children and youth access to quality education in areas impacted by migration, will share their work strengthening and expanding the use of AE models in the country. Their strategy involves work with municipal Secretariats of Education to identify the extent to which AE models are being used in their region, and to scale-up investment in these models. It also involves work with schools to highlight the benefit of different AE models, and the strengthening of teachers’ capacities to lead accelerated learning classrooms.

A representative of the office of Plan International for the Americas will share evidence of the AEPs that exist in the main host countries of the Venezuelan migrant and refugee population: Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. They will highlight some good practices that stand out in these AEPs and offer recommendations to the countries so that they can adapt other existing AEPs for inclusive and comprehensive educational care for migrant and refugee children and youth and their specific educational needs. These recommendations are based on the study of the regulations and the offer of the three countries on AE and take a regional perspective, which allows countries to demonstrate their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in AE, taking as a reference the experience of other countries. Plan International, in alliance with the Ministries of Education of the three countries and the education actors involved at the regional and national level, are developing workshop spaces in 2023 for the positioning of AE and generating strategies to face challenges that still persist for the guarantee of education rights.

A representative of the World Vision Chile office will share the experience in piloting the CUP (Catch Up Program) methodology that has been carried out with Venezuelan migrant and refugee children, in partnership with Unicef ​​and the Chilean Ministry of Education. The panelist will explain the purpose of the program as a targeted intervention to recover basic learning for children who missed education and to help integrate children into the school system at an appropriate age for grade. Framed in a response strategy to the humanitarian emergency in Chile, they will highlight the importance of the educational model and offer recommendations to the countries so they can adapt this type of methodologies with migrant and refugee children and youth in other contexts within LAC region. The discussion will seek to value the importance of responding to the educational gap quickly and actively, and the role of the institutions in ensuring that the educational offer is consistent with the capacities of the population that requires it.

A member of the Inter Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Accelerated Education Working Group (AEWG) / USAID will act as discussant

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Organizer

• Catalina Prada, Fundación Carvajal

Chair

• Catalina Prada, Fundación Carvajal

Individual Presentations

• Equity in Education: Accelerated Education as a catalyst for migrant inclusion in Colombia - Catalina Prada, Fundación Carvajal

• Accelerated education for inclusive and comprehensive educational care for migrant and refugee children: the cases of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia - Lizeth Cardozo Rodriguez, Plan International

• The Catch Up Program (CUP): improving integration of migrant children and youth in Chile. - Vanessa Geraldine Carrillo, World Vision International