Only 30 percent of refugees outside Turkish camps go to school: Report
PARİS
REUTERS photo
Some 700,000 Syrian refugee children aged between 6 and 17 require access to education in Turkey with few of them residing outside designated camps receiving any education, according to a policy paper prepared jointly by the Global Education Monitoring Report of UNESCO and the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR).The report titled “No more excuses: Provide education for all forcibly displaced people” outlines data on education trends among displaced people around the world and demands countries hosting these people include them in their national education programs and gather more information to monitor their situation.
The report shows that while the rate of participation in education among refugee children living in Turkish camps is 85 percent, this rate decreases sharply to 30 percent for those who live outside the camps.
According to the Turkish Education Ministry’s 2016 data, school enrolment rates among Syrian refugees in Turkey were 7 percent in pre-primary education, 52 percent in primary education, 3 percent in lower secondary education and 10 percent in upper secondary education.
The respective rate in 2015 was 6.6 percent in pre-primary education, 52.3 percent in primary education, 31.3 percent in lower secondary education and 9.8 percent in upper secondary education according to the ministry’s data.
The lack of schooling for children amid humanitarian crises poses a threat regardless of whether they stay in their host country or return to their homeland, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova told daily Hürriyet ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit currently taking place in Istanbul.
