They Fled Their Home, Now They Are Teaching Other Refugees

Chad has provided its long-term refugees with a new and rare education strategy that allows them to attend Chadian universities for a more promising future – and girls and young women are especially benefitting from the opportunity.

In a remote refugee camp near the town of Iriba, where 25,000 Sudanese refugees have lived for over 15 years, school tents have been transformed into public institutions that profit from government resources. The new strategy provides refugees with Chadian teacher training to certify them to earn a living educating other refugees. Female teachers have been prioritized, says Charlote Berquin, education officer for the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) in West and Central Africa, because they tend to increase the number of girls in school.

Now, in Iriba’s refugee camps, women make up around 42% of school teachers and more girls go to school than boys. This is an unlikely statistic in the country’s male-dominated education system, where, according to government school inspector Ali Tom, only 3 teachers across 93 schools outside the camps are women, and boys outnumber girls.

The country is the very first in West and Central Africa to include its 440,000 refugees into its national education system. Berquin applauds this, adding, “The goal now is to include refugees in national education systems right from the start.”