A durable solution? Higher education for refugees in Rwanda
Keywords: refugee education
higher education for refugees
education for resettlement
protracted refugee situations
education for repatriation
Rwanda
durable solutions framework
prescription enablement transformation
forced migration
education for local integration
ethical framework for refugee research

Situated within the field of education and forced migration, this mixed methods study looks at the provision of higher education for refugees (HE4R) in Rwanda, in relation to the Durable Solutions Framework (DSF), a global refugee protection strategy that identifies three ‘exit strategies’ in refugee situations: voluntary repatriation (to the country or origin), local integration (into the country of first asylum), or resettlement in a third country.
The study critically examines the bidirectional relationship between the DSF and local HE4R policy and programming, and further explores ways in which HE4R more effectively can unlock solutions to protracted refugee situations (PRSs).
Rwanda is particularly well-suited as a case study on HE4R. The small East African nation hosts around 153,000 refugees, half of whom have lived in Rwandan refugee camps since the late 1990s (UNHCR, 2019f, 2019m). Over the past decades, Rwanda and its neighbors have suffered cycles of ethnic tensions, forced migration, refugee camp militarization, and violence. Refugee management and assistance is therefore a top priority in Rwanda, where forced displacement laid the foundations for the 1994 genocide (Scalzo, 2014). Today, Rwanda has a favorable protection environment for refugees, with a de facto right to work, and unobstructed access to Durable Solutions.
This study adopted a critical constructivist epistemology, wherein the aim was not merely to build an in-depth understanding of the links between HE4R and ‘Durable Solutions’, but to center the voices of refugee students. To achieve this aim, the study employed Charmaz’ (2017) ‘Constructivist Grounded Theory’ (CGT), which allows for grounded theory methods to be adopted and adapted to fit the needs of the study.
Between June 2016 and May 2019, a total of 80 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 64 individuals. Interview participants included: refugee students in Rwanda, resettled refugee students, US resettlement agents, Rwandan authorities, UNHCR staff (global and Rwanda-based), and providers of HE4R (globally and in Rwanda). In addition to the qualitative data, an online survey further explored the views of refugee students. A total of 112 valid survey responses were collected between November 2018 and March 2019. The qualitative and quantitative data were closely integrated both in the process of data collection and analysis.
The study makes empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to the field of forced migration in general, and higher education for refugees in particular. These include (1) a landscape review of HE4R provision in Rwanda, (2) a set of actionable recommendations for Rwandan stakeholders, (3) a new ethical framework for refugee research, and (4) a Theory of Change diagram for HE4R. Finally, the study also contributes to the field of social sciences more broadly through its introduction of a ‘Prescription-Enablement-Transformation’ approach to exploring the link between policy and education.