The UN estimates that more than 70 million people are currently living displaced lives – disrupted by wars and natural calamity – resulting in interrupted education. The Columbia University Scholarship for Displaced Students is an effort to combat this humanitarian and economic loss by providing displaced students with the opportunity to pursue higher education at Columbia University.
This paper, jointly released by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Global Education Monitoring Report in advance of the World Humanitarian Summit, shows that the education rights of forcibly displaced populations are being neglected on a large scale. It calls for countries and their humanitarian and development partners to urgently ensure that internally displaced, asylum seeking and refugee children and youth are included in national education plans, and collect better data to monitor their situation.