STEM in Refugee Education

There are 82 million refugees worldwide, about half of whom are under 18. Being displaced is an earth-shattering experience. One is confronted with violence, loss of family, housing insecurity, inability to access healthcare, financial insecurity (as you’ve lost your means of livelihood), and job insecurity (how will you find a job in a new country with ambiguous legal status?). The predicament is even worse for children and youth as they have to navigate a new, often anemic, education environment in a foreign language. Temporary camps rarely have standing buildings, let alone access to qualified teachers, books, and other basic school supplies. Established camps and communities sometimes have more educational resources but lack the necessary knowledge or equipment like computers to provide a modern education. 

The two fundamental pillars of education, the content (what is being taught) and access (in the form of schools or technology for remote learning), are mostly lacking or outdated in refugee camps. The scarcity of resources results in a reduction in both quality and quantity of what little education is available to refugee youth. The organizations that focus on providing basic education to children stick to the 3Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Once the youth are about ten years old, their educational options are significantly reduced, and the pressure for them to make a financial contribution to their family through labor increases. Internet access, which is fundamental to being a part of the 21st Century student, citizen and workforce  is often not available in many refugee camps; and most teachers in this environment are not trained to deliver remote programs.

Microwork jobs typically involve data annotation like labeling videos, transcribing audio, and identifying images as “house” or “cat.” While microwork is a valid employment, both the work itself and work conditions are akin to modern sweatshops. The work is volatile and completed in cramped workspaces with very little light (Jones, Phil. “Refugees Help Power Machine Learning Advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.” Rest of World, 1). Microwork labor comes with no rights, security, or routine. The labor is paid piece by piece, so laborers are only compensated for the minutes they are actively working. This incentivizes some workers to continue on tasks throughout natural lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, and work longer hours than regulated jobs. Despite the hours of labor completed, many individuals are compensated less than a dollar per hour (Jones, Phil. “Refugees Help Power Machine Learning Advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.” Rest of World, 2). Sometimes employers even “forget” to pay microworkers (Jones, Phil. “Refugees Help Power Machine Learning Advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.” Rest of World, 2). People employed by microwork are paid just enough to buy essential goods, but little more. 

The science and technology jobs that are available  to vulnerable populations can be difficult to assign purpose or value, much less adequate pay or humane working conditions. This is not to say there is no value in teaching STEM, but it is hardly the silver bullet. In these unstable and vulnerable environments the soft skills of communication, adaptability, critical thinking, key tenets of a liberal arts education, would perhaps serve refugee youth better than the linear, rational, input/output framework of STEM. After all, their lives have already unfolded in unexpected, irrational, non-linear ways. To help the refugee youth go from survival to self-reliance to thriving,  perhaps we should return to the essentials. 

As  NGOs look beyond the 3 R's in education, there are any number of interventions ranging from infrastructure (building schools) to basic supplies to skills training programs. The most envogue idea in refugee education is coding, which followed the wake of the rise in STEM education in the US and Europe in the last 15 years. 

The first dot com followed by Web 2.0 fueled, if not led, the passion for STEM education, edging out all other fields. Liberal arts took a back seat and so did all the essential soft skills that are part of a well-rounded liberal arts program. Tech and all things tech-related will be indispensable to the 21st Century and are seen as the only pathway forward. This results in an eagerness of organizations solely focused on bringing STEM to vulnerable populations. The theory of change for STEM education is rational, linear and skirts the complexity and nuance that is inherent in education in any environment, much less education and economic development for vulnerable populations residing in developing economies. 

The thinking goes something like this: coding is an in-demand skill and if we teach refugees how to code, we will have taught them a useful skill that will lead to self-reliance. Where this theory of change fails is in its convenient simplicity. One facet that is rarely discussed is what are the jobs that refugees are eligible for once they know how to code? How will they get paid when X% are unbanked and do not have access to formal financial systems? Instead of becoming a software engineer with the glamor and cache of a U.S. trained and educated coder, refugees trained in STEM all too often end up working for pennies on the dollar in Microwork.