Bright Magazine
Friday September 28, 2018
The full brunt of the sun pierces through the plastic roof of Hassan Noor’s one-room home in Dadaab, a refugee camp located in northeastern Kenya.
Aged 27, all Noor can think about is whether or not he will pass his final exams. When the heat becomes too much, he rolls a school brochure into a makeshift fan to cool himself down.
Noor considers walking 20 minutes to a local school, where at least the shade from nearby trees offers some relief. Or maybe he could hitchhike to the nearest market, where he could finally eat something and drink a cool soda. But there’s no time to waste. Exams are approaching and Noor is determined to pass all of his units this time.
For many university students in Kenya, September has been filled with bouts of cramming for exams, final reviews with professors, and last-minute study sessions with classmates.
The pressure is real for Noor, who is in his final year at Kenyatta University and hopes to graduate in December with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education.
But unlike his peers in Nairobi, Noor joins the classroom digitally, over 400 kilometers away in Dadaab, which as of July 2018 hosts over 209,000 refugees.
It can be hard for Noor to find a quiet place to study, since neighbors surround him on all sides in homes built from corrugated metal and branches. Outside, clouds of dust and passing cars can soil clean clothes and damage precious possessions, including cell phones and reading tablets.
But for Noor, who fled the civil war in Somalia when he was 2 years old, the challenges are worth his soon having a bachelor’s degree. “Now I can at least work, and earn. I can better my life and I can also better the lives of many other people in this world,” he says.
Noor’s virtual education program is the byproduct of a growing international effort to provide refugees and migrants with higher education degrees that can lead to employment. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), only 1 percent of eligible refugees have access to higher education, compared with 36 percent of young people worldwide. The growing size, severity, and protracted nature of global crises have brought new urgency to providing accredited education for adults, especially those who might be thrust into new settings without adequate knowledge and skills to find employment.
While providing education for those displaced by conflict has been a concern for educators and human rights activists since the UN Refugee Convention in 1951, the focus has largely centered on expanding primary and secondary education, with comparatively fewer resources going to higher education.
“What really moved the needle was the Syrian refugee crisis,” says Barbara Moser-Mercer, a professor of conference interpreting at the University of Geneva, on the conflict that has left at least 100,000 university-qualifying students jobless in refugee camps and urban environments. Moser-Mercer is also the founder of InZone, an education incubator that creates higher education spaces in emergency contexts in Africa and the Middle East. “They were clamoring for the continuation of their education journey,” she says. “And there was nothing.”In 2013, educators from a consortium of academic institutions like York University in Toronto, Canada and Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya set out to rectify the dearth of higher education opportunities for refugees.
They established Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER), a program that uses digital learning to provide accredited diplomas and degrees to eligible refugees in the Dadaab camps and surrounding region.
“People have a right to move and a right to continue with their education. It’s a basic human right,” says Josephine Gitome, a lecturer at Kenyatta University. She’s also an early pioneer of the BHER program in Dadaab.
BHER was initially conceived to help turn refugees into accredited teachers, so they could fill the need for educators in and around Dadaab. Since then, the program has expanded to offer degrees in geography, community health education, and international affairs. All diplomas, certificates, and degrees are recognized through one of the participating universities, which means students who are resettled can take their credits to other institutions.
After a long day of work as a teacher, Noor stands for nearly two hours outside a small kiosk, waiting for his electronic devices to charge. An intricate web of cables, wires, and phones lead outside the makeshift charging station to an engine owned by a local businessman that only runs for a few hours in the evenings.
The charge will have to last through the night, as Noor’s room, located a kilometer away from the charging station, does not have electricity. Noor also takes the time to download his remaining coursework. Buying data is expensive these days, but necessary when homework is online instead of in books.
Devices in hand, Noor returns to his single room, sits on his mattress, and studies until the bright light from his reading device lulls him to sleep.
With tablets funded by the UNHCR and international foundations, Noor and his peers can access course units with a click of the button. Students send and receive assignments through email, and communicate periodically with teachers in Nairobi over WhatsApp.
In-person interactions between students and teachers are rare, except during final exams. But a virtual education means that refugees can continue to learn and gain knowledge anytime and anywhere, from refugee camps to their new homes once they get resettled. They can also transfer credits to other universities in their new countries.
Hundreds of kilometers from Dadaab in Kismayo, a coastal town in southern Somalia, Maryan Madobe, a close friend and classmate of Noor, studiously reviews her coursework. A mother of six children, study time is a precious commodity. She hopes to graduate soon with a bachelor’s degree in education with a focus on health and physical education. While the 28-year-old has given birth four times during her studies, including during the hectic exam period, Madobe’s peers and teachers say she is one of the best students in the program.
“Mostly I don’t rest,” says Madobe, who was born in Garissa, Kenya to Somali parents who settled in Kenya following the civil war. Madobe recently relocated to Kismayo to work as a protection assistant at UNHCR. “It is challenging, but there will be a future,” she says confidently. “The only future I have is education.”
Madobe credits the certificate and diploma she received through the BHER program for her new job with UNHCR, which enables her to support her children and younger siblings.
According to Josephine Gitome of Kenyatta University, Madobe is one of many Somali students who have managed to secure a job upon returning to Somalia, or to continue their BHER education at local universities there.
While Madobe admits that her family obligations and bills make attending classes impossible, she misses the in-person interactions with her classmates, and still wishes to one day sit in a real classroom, free of everyday distractions.
Despite the impact technology has had on giving access to education for those unable to sit in classrooms, some experts concede that technology has its limits when it comes to providing quality education to people in emergency situations such as refugees living in camps like Dadaab.
“Technology alone isn’t the answer,” says Jacqueline Strecker, a Connected Education Officer at the UNHCR who finds innovative ways to use technology to provide education to students living in emergencies.
Strecker stresses that technology must match the context, in terms of desired outcomes, environment, and culture. For example, while tablets and other handheld devices are good for reading and watching educational content, they are not as useful for writing assignments and essays.
They are also not as effective in areas without strong internet or consistent electricity. “A lot of our programs have learned that you can’t always rely on connectivity.”
In some cultural contexts, technology, no matter how innovative, is a poor substitute for refugees and migrants who were once thriving in traditional classroom settings. According to a 2017 study on virtual education for Syrian refugees in Jordan, students rated online learning the least desirable form of higher education, due to the lack of interaction and isolation.
“The early assumption was give everyone a tablet,” says Moser-Mercer. “But it’s not that simple.” Even outside of crisis zones, educators contest the use of tablets and other digital technologies in the classroom.
To address the downsides of technology, InZone has created digital community centers, funded by donors and technology companies, where students can come together and use multimedia digital technology to complete coursework together. They also connect students in camps with virtual tutors from Arabic-speaking backgrounds.
Even in Dadaab, where there’s relatively strong internet coverage, the technology needed to run these educational programs are susceptible to breakdowns. Both Noor and Madobe’s tablets broke a few months ago and now sit in a Nairobi shop waiting to be repaired. Noor uses his phone to download notes and assignments from an online student page before sending them to Madobe via WhatsApp.
Despite the technological challenges they encounter regularly, Madobe’s virtual experience has left its mark. She hopes to use her degree to create health and physical education programs for young people in the Somali community.
As for Noor, he dreams of getting the necessary funding to pursue a master’s degree in political science or development economics so he can one day return to Somalia to be a civil servant. “I have to take part in the development of the country,” he says.