Universities that rush in to help refugees displaced by global crises risk doing more harm than good if they do not work with humanitarian agencies, a United Nations expert has warned.
Frankie Randle, an education specialist at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said tertiary-level training was a vital “way of rebuilding lives” for people forced to flee conflict and natural disasters.
But he told the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit that universities that did not do this care risked breaching the fundamental humanitarian principle of “do no harm”.
“There’s often a sense from universities that ‘we need to do something, we need to step in, we need to provide courses’,” Mr Randle told the event at the University of Manchester.
“But maybe they haven’t sorted out the long-term funding, maybe they haven’t worked out what accreditation looks like, or the courses are in English and the students don’t speak English, or the courses they offer are the ones that the university can provide, which aren’t necessarily relevant to the labour market or what the students require.
“All of this can leave students feeling frustrated; it can lead students to drop out. ‘Do no harm’ is the fundamental humanitarian principle and for universities wanting to get involved in this space we really encourage them to work with UNHCR and other humanitarian actors to ensure there is that rigorous do-no-harm approach based on humanitarian principles.”
Last month the UNHCR released new figures showing that just 7 per cent of displaced learners are enrolled in tertiary education, compared with 37 per cent of non-refugee students. That is more than double the 3 per cent seen in 2018 – with an additional 50,000 refugee students enrolled in the four years up to 2022 – but still below the target of 15 per cent by 2030.
Mr Randle told the summit that higher education was for a long time “not given priority in the humanitarian sector”, in part because it was considered to be too expensive.
But he said that the UNHCR had long seen higher education “as an enabler, as a way of unlocking opportunity, of rebuilding lives”, helping refugees to integrate into countries where they were hosted and to help rebuild their homelands on their return.
Mr Randle highlighted that the “vast majority” of refugees were located in low- and middle-income countries neighbouring the regions they had fled, suggesting that universities should consider how best they could help in these territories, not just on their own doorsteps.
