Refugee girls living in emergency situations such as extreme poverty and cultural entrenchment are at a high risk of dropping out of school.
This is according to the Forum for African Women Educationalists Kenya (FAWE), a women’s rights group working to advance girls’ education.
Teresa Otieno, CEO of FAWE said the organisation realised a group of girls was being left out when campaigning for the education of girls across the country.
“We did our research and realised that girls in such emergencies were not being focused on. Even the data on them was not present yet they faced many challenges in their education,” she said.
She was speaking on Thursday during a meeting at a Nairobi hotel to discuss how they will use data to advocate for the education of these affected girls.
Otieno said that FAWE partnered with Equal Measures 2030 to do a case study of refugee girls in Eastleigh area of Nairobi between March and September this year.
“The girls come from Ethiopia, Burundi, Eritrea, South Sudan, DRC, and Uganda in search of jobs as househelps, fleeing violence in their countries and escaping harmful cultural practices like Female Genital Mutilation,” Otieno said.
When they try to access education in Kenya, she said, the girls feel they are too old to go back to school and they feel stigmatised because of their ethnicity and their age.
“Some girls originally from South Sudan told me that they get funny looks from other students because they are darker and look older than the rest. This discourages them from going to school,” she said.
The study also found that early marriage and female genital mutilation forced them to cut short their education, as their cultures demanded such rites of passage for them as young adolescent girls.
“This kind of sexual gender-based violence goes unreported by the girls because refugee girls are generally secretive and it is in fact rare to find teen pregnancies among refugees,” Otieno revealed.
The girls revealed in the case study that some of them are married and allowed to attend school.
However, when they fall pregnant, they are immediately withdrawn from school without the notice of teachers and pupils.
During the pandemic, Otieno said, a great number of refugee girls disappeared from schools in that manner, perpetuated by the closure of schools countywide.
According to the Global Citizen 152,000 girls fell pregnant during the first three months of lockdown.
But there is no data on the same for refugee girls alone.
The study found that 71.4 per cent of the girls interviewed knew a girl among them who became pregnant during lockdown.
“When girls across the country who had fallen pregnant were being urged to go back to school, refugees girls were not highlighted to be taken back to school because the situation was not known and the data was not available,” she said.
Otieno expressed hope their case study would be compelling enough to make the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of gender intervene to help the girls get access to education, increase retention as well as performance and participation in schools.
She also hopes that their transition into secondary schools will be focused on as the study found 57.7 per cent of urban refugee girls interviewed indicated they knew many urban refugee girls who passed their KCPE but did not join high school.
She called upon rights groups and organisations that fight for women and girls to invest in data collection so as to use it as evidence when advocating for their rights.
