Millions of children are forced to flee their homes every year and unable to go to school. Ahead of Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Financing Conference in February 2023, a new report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), launched with the EiE Hub and the International Data Alliance for Children on the Move (IDAC), highlights the need to mobilise resources to ensure Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have access to education. It also notes that the impacts of displacement vary depending on a child’s gender, disability status and other characteristics, and that the lack of reliable and consistent tracking of those displaced within countries is a significant challenge to meeting their educational needs.
The research was designed to fill important knowledge gaps about this issue, since it is known that internal displacement can have a huge impact on children’s access to continuous, quality education. It shows that cost of providing 14 million IDPs with education support via humanitarian response plans in 2021 was estimated to be over $1 billion. Yet resource and funding constraints mean that many IDPs are missing out on such vital support. As few as 1 in 3 girls in countries affected by crises will have completed secondary education by 2030.
Education is a fundamental right for every child. Yet in 2021, as many as 9 million internally displaced children did not receive support through humanitarian response plans to ensure they did not miss out on education. Learn more from IDMC’s new report on the topic.
The report provides an overview of the data landscape on IDPs’ education and top-line estimates of the number of internally displaced boys and girls of school age in 13 countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Iraq, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
It explores different data sources and methodologies to measure internally displaced children’s access to education, and the cost of providing them with education support. It concludes by outlining promising practices and ways forward in improving the collection and use of reliable, timely and comparable data to inform effective interventions.
One of the key takeaways of the report is that improvements in the availability of quality data on IDPs’ education access and outcomes, and how these vary depending on their gender, disability and other characteristics, is needed. Such data is a prerequisite for understanding the scale of the issue, planning and costing effective responses, measuring progress and evaluating the impact of interventions.
