Ethiopia’s 2019 refugee law could widen refugees’ access to higher education, but the country has no clear plan to pay for it, scholar Wondwosen Tamrat wrote in University World News.
Shimelba refugee camp, which hosted Eritrean refugees in northern Ethiopia, in a frame from the documentary Home Across Lands, filmed in May 2008. (John Lavall / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) [file photo]
Wondwosen, an associate professor and founding president of St. Mary’s University in Addis Ababa, wrote in August 2019 that Ethiopia hosted close to 1 million refugees from some 24 countries, making it one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world and the second largest in Africa.
South Sudanese were the largest group at 422,240, followed by Somalis at 253,889, Eritreans at 173,879 and Sudanese at 44,620, he wrote. About 23,000 refugees were registered in cities, 80 percent of them Eritreans.
Parliament adopted the revised law on Jan. 17, 2019, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. Published as Refugees Proclamation No. 1110/2019 on Feb. 27, 2019, it replaced the 2004 Refugee Proclamation No. 409, which had restricted movement out of camps, employment and education outside camps.
The new law gives refugees the right to work for wages, to own and transfer property, to move and choose where to live, and to use national health and education services on the same basis as Ethiopians. It also opens access to banking, telecommunications, identity and travel documents and driver’s licenses.
Until then, university places for refugees came mainly through out-of-camp schemes and UNHCR scholarships, Wondwosen wrote. In 2017, 28 Ethiopian institutions hosted 729 students on the UNHCR-backed DAFI scholarship, including 388 from Somalia, 169 from Sudan, 88 from South Sudan and 63 from Eritrea. Free places at public universities had enabled 1,500 Eritrean refugees to study, he wrote, citing UNHCR.
The government pledged to raise refugee enrolment in higher education from 1,600 to 2,500 students, according to the article.
“By allowing refugees the opportunity to be better integrated into society, Ethiopia is not only upholding its international refugee law obligations, but is serving as a model for other refugee hosting nations around the world,” UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said when the law passed.
Wondwosen cautioned that the law carries political, demographic and economic strains. Anuak people in Gambella region protested that it was passed without their consent and that equal rights for refugees threatened them because refugees outnumbered them in the region, he wrote.
UNHCR covered only 25 percent of the cost of refugees’ university education, with the government paying the rest through subsidies to public universities, he wrote. Ethiopia provided higher education to only 12 percent of its own eligible students, and no clear strategy existed for the extra resources needed, according to the article.
Sources: University World News: Wondwosen Tamrat, “A new refugee law – Implications for higher education” (Aug. 2019), UNHCR (Jan. 18, 2019), Refworld: Refugees Proclamation No. 1110/2019