Girls at the Border of Everything-Refugee Girl's Education in 2026.

Education for refugee girls, Displacement, and What We Owe Girls Who Survived More Than Most of Us Will Ever Understand

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By JB Favour

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a girl when she has been told, in one way or another, that her education is not the priority right now.

I have sat across from that silence. I have watched it behind eyes that are still sharp, still curious, still reaching, even as everything around those eyes has said: wait. survive first. learn later. And I have learned that "later" is the most dangerous word in the English language when you are a displaced girl on the edge of adolescence, in a country that is not your own, in a system that was never designed with you in mind.

This piece is about those girls. But it is also about us, the advocates, the funders, the policy writers, the nonprofit leaders and the question of whether we are actually doing what we say we are doing when we talk about girls' education in displacement settings.

The Numbers We Cite, and the Lives They Cannot Contain

Let us start with what the data tells us, because the data matters.

According to UNHCR's 2025 Refugee Education Report, there are approximately 12.4 million school-aged refugee children in the world right now. Nearly half of them an estimated 5.7 million are not in school at all. Among those who are enrolled, secondary school access drops sharply: only 29% of refugee girls are enrolled at the secondary level, compared to 31% of boys. The gap sounds small in percentage points. In actual lives, it is millions of girls sitting on the wrong side of a closed door.

And then there is the higher education cliff. Tertiary enrollment for refugees sits at just 9% — up from 7% the year before, which UNHCR rightly celebrates as the greatest progress on record. Nine percent. For context, the global average tertiary enrollment rate hovers around 40%. The gap between a refugee girl and a higher education degree is not a gap. It is a canyon.

But what the statistics cannot capture is the specific weight that displacement places on girls — weight that is categorically different from what it places on their brothers, their male peers, their male counterparts in policy conversations about refugee education.

The Specific Weight

When a family is forced to flee, it is rarely the boys who are first expected to contribute to survival. It is rarely the boys who are most vulnerable to the protection risks that proliferate in refugee settings. And it is rarely the boys whose futures are first negotiated away when resources run short. In fact, during my first weeks as Executive Director for an International Nonprofit serving East Africa, I learned with horror the unimaginable trade the young girls we served faced. Their families preferred to trade them for cattle!

Research from Ugandan refugee host districts shows that early pregnancy among girls in refugee settlements increased during COVID-19, with rates in some settlements reaching nearly five times the national average. In Ethiopia's Gambella region, more than one-third of adolescent girls in refugee camps had experienced pregnancy at least once. Not attending school was one of the most significant risk factors and being out of school was often itself the consequence of family pressure, not a free choice.

UNESCO estimates that 34 million adolescent girls are out of primary and secondary school across Africa. UNICEF has reported that fewer than 5% of girls return to school after pregnancy. Less than five percent. The rest absorb the loss quietly, the way girls have always been expected to absorb loss.

This is the specific weight I am talking about. Not just displacement. Not just poverty. But the particular convergence of gender, conflict, and cultural expectation that makes every single structural barrier hit girls harder, last longer, and cost more.

What the Frameworks Promise, and Where They Fall Short

I want to be fair to the policy architecture that exists, because it is not nothing.

The 2017 Djibouti Declaration on Refugee Education, adopted by eight East African nations under the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), committed member states — including South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia to integrating refugees into national education systems, establishing regional qualification frameworks, and simplifying the mechanisms through which refugee children access school. It was, when it was signed, a meaningful political commitment. It gave organizations like mine something concrete to point to when we advocated for our students.

SDG 4, the UN's commitment to inclusive and quality education for all, speaks explicitly to leaving no one behind. The UNHCR's 2030 Refugee Education Strategy set a target of getting 15% of refugee youth into tertiary education by 2030. Six years after that strategy launched, we are at 9%.

The frameworks are real. The gap between what they promise and what girls in displacement settings are actually living is also real.

As UNESCO and UNHCR jointly found, while three in four countries legally guarantee access to education for refugees, full inclusion is rarely realized. Legal frameworks frequently lack comprehensive provisions. Refugees remain largely invisible in educational statistics with only four in ten data collection exercises accurately identifying them. You cannot design a system for people who do not appear in your data.

And now, cuts to humanitarian and development aid are threatening even the modest progress that has been made. UNHCR's 2025 report warns explicitly that hard-won gains in refugee education enrollment are at risk. In a moment when the numbers were finally, slowly beginning to move in the right direction, the funding floor is shifting beneath them.

What I Have Seen in the Field

I help lead an organization PASS USA, that provides full-ride scholarships to South Sudanese youth and refugees, with a deliberate focus on girls' education. I say this not to position myself as a hero in this story. I say it because the fieldwork matters here.

What I have seen is this: the girls who make it to higher education are not just talented. They are survivors of a specific kind of endurance that the application form does not have a box for. They have navigated early marriage pressure. They have watched younger siblings rely on them. They have managed the quiet humiliation of being told that their brother's school fees matter more this semester. They have done all of this while also being brilliant, driven, and completely clear about what they want their lives to look like.

And then they meet a visa system that does not recognize their statelessness. A university admissions process that penalizes gaps in enrollment without asking what created them. A scholarship landscape that funds the most "fundable" version of refugee girlhood the neat narrative, the trauma already resolved, the English already fluent rather than the complex, unfinished, fully human version.

The frameworks do not fail these girls because no one cares. They fail because caring is not the same as designing for reality.

So What Does It Actually Take?

I want to resist the temptation to end this piece with a tidy list of solutions. Tidy lists are how we make ourselves feel better without doing the harder work of sitting inside the complexity long enough to understand it.

But I will say this.

It takes funding that does not evaporate the moment a conflict reaches its second decade and stops generating headlines. Displacement is not an emergency. For millions of girls in East Africa, it is the only reality they have ever known.

It takes education systems - national and international that treat the gaps in a girl's academic journey as context to understand, not deficits to penalize. If she was out of school for three years, the question is not "why?" as a disqualifier. It is "what did it take for her to come back?" and "how do we make sure she does not have to fight that hard alone?"

It takes a willingness, among those of us who work in this space, to name the gender-specific dimension of displacement without diluting it into general "vulnerable population" language that makes everyone comfortable and changes nothing.

And it takes listening to the girls themselves. Not as symbols. Not as case studies. As thinkers, strategists, and decision-makers about their own lives.

A Final Question

There is a question I carry from this work that I do not have a clean answer to.

If we know and we do know, the data is unambiguous, that educating girls in displacement settings produces generational returns for families, communities, and economies, then the question is not whether it is worth the investment.

The question is: why, in 2026, are we still treating it like a charitable act rather than a political obligation?

The Djibouti Declaration was signed. The SDGs were adopted. The 2030 targets were set. The commitments are on paper, in the language of political will.

What is still missing is the urgency. The kind of urgency that matches what it feels like to be a girl at the border of everything at the edge of adolescence, at the edge of a country's policy framework, at the edge of a future that is still possible, still there, still waiting and running out of time.

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JB Favour is currently the Executive Director of PASS USA (Padoc Area Scholars Society, USA), a nonprofit based in the United States but serving East Africa, providing full-ride higher education scholarships, wraparound support, leadership and mentorship. to underserved South Sudanese youth and refugees, with a strong focus on girls' education across East Africa. She writes about global education equity, nonprofit leadership, and the intersection of advocacy and policy.