Written by Jeanne Lalonger-Laurent
December 20, 2021
“Education is like oxygen for us” asserts Shadia, a refugee girl living in the Dadaab camps (Save the Children). Dadaab is a refugee complex founded in 1991 which reunites three camps – Dagahaley, Ifo, and Hagadera – and housed 218,873 refugees at the end of July 2020, most of whom are Somalis fleeing the civil war in Somalia (UNHCR). It is one of the biggest refugee camps in the world. Many girls in Dadaab, unlike Shadia, are not schooled, and even less can access secondary school. This is due to several factors, the most important ones being the lack of funding in the education sector that plagued Dadaab for many years, and the prioritization of boys’ education over that of girls.
Refugee Education in Dadaab
Although Dadaab was founded in 1991, which makes it thirty years old this year, it wasn’t until the last decade that education became a prevalent concern. The UNHCR, also known as the UN Refugee Agency, published its Global Education Strategy 2012-2016 in 2012. It is now considered as an important shift in the way the agency approaches education because it “acknowledged and sought to address the long-term nature of refugees’ exile through including refugees in national education systems, rather than isolating them in parallel systems in camps” (Monaghan 89). Before that, education was addressed on an ad hoc basis in Dadaab. The Global Education Strategy brought forth education as a vital goal in refugee situations, especially protracted ones, and enabled the UNHCR to greatly increase its budget for education initiatives.
The Dadaab camps, however, are especially underfunded (in all sectors, but especially in education) because of the ongoing civil war in Somalia. The never-ending flux of refugees coming to Dadaab locked the camps in their “relief phase”, which caters to the survival of refugees at the peak of the crisis, when they should have been advanced in their “development phase” by now, which addresses non-lethal problems that refugees face.
This “relief-to-development-gap” (MacKinnon 1) has only widened as time passed by since the international community began to lose interest in the camps, turning its attention to new crises. This made the Dadaab camps unable to cater to its educational needs even with the increased budget of the UNHCR.
Dadaab, as of 2019, has 22 primary schools and 9 secondary schools where the ratio of teachers to students ranges from 1:60 to 1:80 (Matengo). There is also a considerable shortage of desks and materials, prompting students to sometimes write on the floor or share a textbook with multiple peers at the same time (Monaghan 44). There is thus a subsequent need for more schools and more teachers for the entire refugee population.
About 40% of refugee children are still unable to enroll in primary school even if the UNHCR agrees that it is fundamental to their healthy development (Grandi et al., “What is the scale of the challenge?”). Not only does education enable children to strive for better jobs when they reach adulthood, but it also enables them to develop their soft skills because it impacts the development of their socialization. It also ensures that they do not fall into an idleness that may encourage them to turn to “drugs and then criminal activities” (MacKinnon 5) and make them easy prey for recruitment in armed groups “such as Somalia’s Al Shabaab” (MacKinnon 5).
Refugee Girls’ Education
The shortage of educational resources especially affects girl refugees. The fact that there is a very limited number of places in the schools combined with the influence of gender stereotypes and gender roles reduce girls’ chances to have access to the education system in Dadaab.
Women are traditionally considered as home keepers and as responsible for taking care of the family members (Grandi et al., “What are the barriers?”), but girls’ education challenges this order. It stresses that girls have the same potential for learning and becoming self-reliant individuals as boys do.
Education also “reduces girls’ vulnerability to exploitation, sexual and gender-based violence, teenage pregnancy and child marriage.” (Grandi et al., “Why educate refugee girls?”). Even though the belief that girls’ education is important is growing in popularity in refugee camps, it is unfortunately not established enough so that there are as many girls in school than there are boys.
The prioritization of boys’ education does not only rely on misconceptions about girls’ intelligence, though. Girls are perceived by traditional standards as having the opportunity to live a decent life even without an education because they can marry and be responsible for the household. Boys, however, do not have the possibility of taking care of the household, and must therefore absolutely secure a job. This shows that gender roles do not simply limit girls, but also boys. They nonetheless disadvantage girls much more than they do boys.
When it comes to primary education, there are seven refugee girls enrolled in school for ten boys in Kenya’s refugee camps (Grandi et al., “What is the scale of the challenge”). This ratio drops to four girls for every ten boys in secondary school (Grandi et al., “What is the scale of the challenge”) since “boys are often prioritized because they are seen as having greater future earning potential” (Grandi et al., “What are the barriers?”), which relates to the gender roles mentioned earlier where the man is considered as the “breadwinner” of the household.
Can the Situation for Girls Get Better?
But how can girls’ education be improved in Dadaab? Fatuma Omar Ismail, a former Dadaab refugee girl who is now studying at the University of Toronto because of her academic excellence, suggests that a first step is to “[p]romote more gender-friendly education systems”, where the curriculum taught to refugees, the classroom environment, and the teachers’ training are more attuned to gender inequality and to ways to be inclusive to girls (World University Service of Canada).
Setting up a system which is more attuned to girls’ realities ensures that girls are treated fairly and respectfully, which in turn favours more girls to reach higher education that would enable them to become teachers and set an example for the girls that will come after them.
To summarize, girls’ education has come a long way since the creation of the Dadaab camps, but there is still much to do to ensure girls are given the opportunities they deserve. Only by putting an end to gender roles and gender stereotypes will girls be able to reach their full potential in school and in adulthood.
However, this will only be possible if greater resources are sent to Kenya’s refugee camps, especially now that the Dadaab camps are once again under the threat of dismantlement (Horowitz & Michelitch).
Sources:
Grandi, Filippo, et al. “Her Turn”, UNHCR, 2018, www.unhcr.org/herturn/. Accessed December 2021.
Horowitz, Jeremy, & Michelitch, Kristin. “Kenya might expel refugees to their home countries”, Washington Post, 25 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/25/kenya-might-expel-refugees-their-home-countries/. Accessed December 2021.
Mackinnon, H. “Education In Emergencies: The Case Of The Dadaab Refugee Camps.” Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2014, www.jstor.org/stable/resrep05200. Accessed December 2021.
Matengo, Dinah. “For Dadaab’s children, access to education is still limited”, CGTN Africa, 10 June 2019, africa.cgtn.com/2019/06/10/for-dadaabs-children-access-to-education-is-still-limited/. Accessed December 2021.
Monaghan, Christine. Educating for Durable Solutions : Histories of Schooling in Kenya's Dadaab and Kakuma Refugee Camps. First ed., Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2021, 10.5040/9781350133327. Accessed December 2021.
“Dadaab Refugee Complex”. UNHCR, (n.d.), www.unhcr.org/ke/dadaab-refugee-complex. Accessed December 2021.
Wagner, Emma. “Education is like oxygen for us”, Save the Children, 22 Sept. 2017, www.savethechildren.net/news/education-oxygen-us. Accessed December 2021.
World University Service of Canada. “3 ways to improve refugee girls’ education in Kenya”, ONE, 3 Jan. 2018, www.one.org/us/blog/3-ways-to-improve-refugee-girls-education-in-kenya/. Accessed December 2021.
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