The Global Cost of Inclusive Refugee Education
This report estimates the cost of educating refugee children in the countries in which they currently reside. The cohort-average annual cost of providing education to all refugee students in low, lower-middle and upper-middle income host countries...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/159281614191477048/The-Global-Cost-of-Inclusive-Refugee-Education http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35238 |
| Summary: | This report estimates the cost of
educating refugee children in the countries in which they
currently reside. The cohort-average annual cost of
providing education to all refugee students in low,
lower-middle and upper-middle income host countries is 4.85
billion US Dollars. A sensitivityanalysis, relaxing model
assumptions, suggests the estimate lies in the range of 4.44
billion and 5.11 billion US Dollars. The total financing
envelope required to provide K-12 years of education over a
13-year period to 2032 is 63 billion. As data on the impact
of COVID-19’s (coronavirus)impact on education costs and
public expenditure is still evolving, this paper provides a
pre-COVID-19 baseline for the estimated costs of educating
all refugee children. The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR)
has placed enhanced responsibility-sharing at the center of
the international refugee protection agenda. It commits
stakeholders to specific measures to achieve that goal,
including a proposal to measure their contributions.
Thisrequires a standardized and transparent methodology,
developed through a participatory process, that can be used
across all host countries; and provides the motivation for
this work. The report is cognizant of the fact that
education in emergencies is not only a humanitarian crisis
but also a development crisis with large numbers of refugee
children spending their whole education life cycle in
displaced settings. These environments are often already
stretched to deliver quality education services. Eighty-five
percent of the world’s displaced persons are hosted in low
and lower middle-income countries. Where refugees are
concentrated in border or rural regions, inclusive education
systems can direct resources to previously underserved areas
in host countries. Inclusive national education systems
promote a streamlined response to the large influx of
refugees by building resilient systems with benefits for
refugees and host communities alike. It creates a framework
for the international community to harmonize efforts and
share the collective burden and responsibility of refugee
education. The costing methodology developed in this report
is based on the key premise that refugee education is
embedded in the host country education system, facing the
same cost drivers and efficiency and quality constraints.
This implies that refugee students receive an education that
is "no better, no worse" than host country
students in terms of teacher quality, school infrastructure,
access to learning materials and other inputs. It starts
with the public unit cost of education in each country for
each level of education. Refugee education coefficients are
then added to the unit costs to provide education services
essential to the integration ofrefugees into national
systems. These services include accelerated learning
programmes, psychosocial support, support in the language of
instruction, teacher training in refugee inclusiveness and
so on. In addition, given the historical levels of low
investment in earlychildhood education (ECE), this paper
adds an ECE coefficient to primary public unit costs to
estimate pre-primary costs for each country. While this
paper uses uniform coefficients acrossall countries, these
are likely to vary based on the local context. |
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