ISLAMABAD: UNESCO in collaboration with UNHCR has launched today the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2019 with the theme of this year namely ‘Migration, displacement, and education: Building bridges, not walls’.
The third in the series, the GEM Report provides its assessment of the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal on Education (SDG-4) and its targets.
The report looks at migration and displacement through the eyes of teachers and education administrators faced with the reality of diverse classrooms, schoolyards, communities, labor markets, and societies.
The 2019 Report elucidates the relationship between migration, displacement, and education and presents evidence on the scale and characteristics of different types of migration and displacement and their implications on education and vice versa.
The fact that education opportunities often serve as a major driver in the decision to migrate, the complex process of migration or displacement can also interrupt education, the report observed.
According to the report released here, education systems around the world are united in the commitment to achieve the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ and to leave no one behind.
The GEM report 2019 claims that for all students to fulfill their promise, systems need to adjust to their needs irrespective of their backgrounds. Education systems also need to respond to societies’ need to be resilient and adapt to migration and displacement – a challenge affecting countries with large or small migrant and refugee populations.
Chairperson of the GEM Report Advisory Board Helen Clark in the report remarked, “The 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report has been brought together by a team of international migrants. Four of its members are children of refugees. They don’t deny that people look at migration – and migrants from different viewpoints. Their research demonstrates the extent to which education can help open up those perspectives and bring greater opportunities for all.”
The report aims at focusing education’s role to ‘promote understanding, tolerance, and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups’ as the world is starting to address the education needs of moving and hosting populations.
It mainly covers all types of population movement whereas the largest but most neglected is internal migration, the report revealed.
“On average, 1 out of 8 people live outside the region or province where they were born. While many internal movements have innocuous consequences, some, particularly in rapidly urbanizing low and middle income countries, have serious effects on the educational opportunities of those moving and those left behind,” said the report.
The research-cum-report gives the account that access to education at destination may be constrained due to deliberate administrative rules or simple neglect, adding “On average, about 1 out of 30 people live in a country other than the one where they were born. Almost two-thirds are in high-income countries which explain the political prominence of the issue in those countries.”
Euphemistically, it has been observed that international migrants are more likely to be of working age and, therefore, older than the population in destination countries. While most move to work, the extent to which their skills are recognized, utilized and rewarded is a key factor in the level to which they succeed.
But many moves for education, which several measures can facilitate, hence, their migration also affects descendants, in the next generation if not beyond, the report stated.
The report while encircling the recent of wave migration due to increased conflicts and natural disasters said, “Some 1 out of 80 people are displaced within or across borders by conflict or natural disasters, with the number having risen rapidly in recent years. Nine out of ten of the displaced live in low and middle-income countries. Delivering education for displaced people is part of restoring their sense of normalcy, structure, and hope, but it can be challenging, conditioned by the unique social, economic and political contexts of displacement.”
With the present era facing unprecedented occurrences of displacements among various countries of the world the report terms that education needs to help these populations cope with protracted displacement and prepare them for a variety of futures.
The report has further exhumed that definitions for various categories of people on the move are meant to establish clear criteria that ensure respect for their rights. “Yet even apparently clear-cut categories are less so in practice. In defining international migrants, for instance, some countries and organizations base nationality on the descent, others on place of birth. Some categories provoke considerable controversy; fierce political arguments erupt over whether people migrate willingly to seek a better future or are forcibly displaced by human-caused or natural disasters,” the report mentioned.
It further put a skeptic outlook over the ‘Host communities’ attitude towards displaced population as they may interrogate migrants’ and refugees’ motivation (e.g. whether for work or education), legality (e.g. whether documented) or responsibility (e.g. whether victims of a crisis). Such arguments can divert focus from migrants’ and refugees’ well-being which would be hostile for their existence in the host region, the report added.