Why Initiatives Fail in Refugee Education

 Many initiatives that provide innovative education to refugees and other vulnerable communities are unfortunately short-lived. While dozens of programs are conceived each year, few make it past the pilot stage despite adequate funding and approval from the community it serves. This phenomenon is attributed to two key factors: a lack of incentive to replicate a program at scale and the inability to measure tangible success.

In 2021, a group of researchers implemented a STEM program for refugees living in the United States, particularly those who speak minoritized languages. The initiative aims to teach refugee students physics and computer science by building cosmic rays over the span of three years. While the program aims to teach vulnerable youth, its primary purpose is to research how and why students from disenfranchised backgrounds are excluded from STEM. Unfortunately, the program may terminate after its three-year pilot due to a lack of funding, lack of donor interest, or the notion that the program already served its purpose.

The instability of education programs for refugees is born out of a disconnect between the subjects and outcomes of the study. The researchers are typically more interested in collecting and analyzing data than ensuring the longevity of the programs. Ironically, these programs that aim to further STEM education in vulnerable populations often further perpetuate the issue of delivering then removing a method of learning: they enter communities eager to grasp at any tangible form of education and leave the community without any way to replicate the program when the initiative is complete.

Short-lived pilot programs are often far more creative than traditional education provided in refugee camps. This innovation is essential not just to vulnerable groups but to the whole sectors of humanitarian aid as a whole. The idea that innovative educational programs lack the immediacy required in emergency situations is a misconception. Rather, refugee education demands innovation. Refugees lose valuable learning opportunities while experiencing conflict and displacement, so their subsequent schooling should compensate for the gaps in traditional education and find creative ways to make up for lost time. 

The failure to sustain and extend beyond the initial pilot programs can also be attributed to the inability to measure success. Staffing shortages, information shortages, and inadequate infrastructure can make it nearly impossible to track improvement in areas like literacy, math, and confidence levels. Longitudinal studies are rare in the field and difficult to implement. For the smaller, newer, often underfunded organizations can  lack the technical expertise to report these metrics back to donors, so they lose funding after the pilot stage.

Data collection is essential to program development. All too often volunteers and project officers would rather spend time with the children they are working with than typing numbers into spreadsheets. Moreover, some programs still use manual paperwork because of technological deficiencies at the staff level or a lack of technology access at the organizational level. The physical paper is often hard to keep track of, destroyed due to rain and other natural occurrences, or difficult to deliver back to donors. 

Donors and foundation’s demand for proof of a program’s effectiveness in a single year can prematurely kill innovation that needs a longer runway and more time in the field to iterate and improve. This need for quick measurable outcomes  results in donors favoring more traditional programs with historical success, and organizations are funded to do what has been done before. This opposing dynamic can severely limit the scope and success of any projects, especially programs that are operating within complex systems such as refugee youth.