Together for Learning on World Refugee Day

Today, for World Refugee Day, it is critical to highlight the global learning crisis, particularly for refugee, forcible-displaced and host community children who are at risk of ‘being left behind’. Globally, 3.7 million refugee children are out of school and girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school if they live in conflict areas.

This holds true in places like Colombia, where the Venezuelan migrant crisis is the second largest migrant crisis in the world. This crisis, combined with strict COVID-19 lockdowns, internal armed conflict, and climate shocks, has strained the Colombian education system and created massive learning losses and risks of drop out for girls and boys. We also see high levels of sexual and gender-based violence, particularly for girls, and recruitment of children by armed groups.

One such girl is Merly*, who was only 13 when her family was forced to leave Venezuela due to the economic collapse and take refuge at the Colombian-Venezuela border. When Merly first arrived, she struggled in school. Her teachers were highly overloaded and unaccepting to Venezuelan children.

“Teachers did not want to accept me because they said Venezuelan children only delayed the learning of others,” said Merly.

With COVID-19 and school closures, Merly faced even further challenges with virtual classes. The only device she and her three sisters had to study from was their mother’s old cell phone; where they took turns doing their homework every day.

Save the Children is a proud supporter of Global Affairs Canada’s Together for Learning campaign to promote quality education and lifelong learning for children and youth like Merly, who are refugees, forcibly displaced, or living in host communities.

In partnership with Global Affairs Canada, Save the Children is implementing Beyond Borders—a three-year, $10 million project in Colombia that works with more than 10,000 Venezuelan refugee and Colombian children along the border to ensure they realize their rights to safe, quality and gender-responsive learning.

Beyond Borders aligns with the Together for Learning Campaign and its four key areas:

1.Programming excellence:

Save the Children ensures that all children, especially girls like Merly, have access to quality education. We work with teachers to strengthen gender-responsive and inclusive teaching strategies. We have developed a comprehensive teaching program with the local partner, Aulas en Paz, for teachers to build socio-emotional learning competencies with students and create classrooms of peace.

We also partner with schools to create safe school environments—improving school infrastructure and washroom facilities and providing dedicated psychosocial support and case management to ensure girls and boys are safe and free of violence in and around schools.

We offer remedial learning support to girls and boys, through Save the Children’s evidence-based and innovative Catch-up Clubs, which helps girls and boys catch-up on lost learning due to COVID-19 and displacement, and improve their literacy skills to succeed in school.

Watch a short video on our Catch-up Clubs here.

 

2. Amplifying local voices:

As part of Canada’s commitment to listen and learn from the voices of refugees, people who are displaced and those in host-communities, Save the Children has established Girls Clubs in the Beyond Borders projects. Through these clubs, girls build solidarity between refugee-host groups and host girl-led campaigns, such as the “My Dreams Go with Me” girl-led campaign, in which Merly and other girl refugees participated. These campaigns targets communities, civil society and educators and offer girls the opportunity to tell their stories, talk about the challenges they faced on their journey from Venezuela to Colombia, speak to their education needs, and dreams for the future.

 

3. Engaging through diplomacy:

As part of Beyond Borders, Save the Children has hosted forums and engagement activities with local government, education stakeholders, and civil society in Colombia to drive policy dialogue and advocacy for the education of all children. This includes the girl-led campaigns described above, as well as the first national forum, “Education without Borders”, held in November 2021 in partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Colombia to promote discussions on education, including the safe return to school, digital divide and girls’ education. The event involved more than 400 people from eight departments including children, families, Education Secretariats, representatives from the Ministry of Education, donors, embassies, civil-society and the private sector. Girls had the opportunity to meet candidates of the Colombian parliament where they requested political commitment to guarantee gender equality and girls and boys’ equal rights to education.

4. Building the evidence base:

Through the Beyond Borders project, we continue to better understand and address the gap in gender-sensitive and disaggregated data. We conducted a gender+ assessment to better understand the gender and social barriers and discriminatory norms that perpetuate and normalize violence and the exclusion of girls and refugee groups in education. We use this data to inform our project activities. Save the Children also has a robust data management system to track girls and boys’ learning outcomes, particularly literacy levels. As we know, if girls and boys are not learning or falling behind, this leads to dropout. Tracking children’s learning progress is a critical area for refugee and girl education programming.

Together we are working to ensure safe and quality learning for all children. Learn more about our global education work at Save the Children and how you can support refugee girls like Merly.

“Now I have the necessary tools to better attend my classes. I have the talent to speak in public and also discovered that I want to continue being the voice of children,” said Merly. “I am learning so much with the Beyond Borders project, especially on the rights of girls and boys, because we must demand our rights.”

 

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of child participants.