# Introduction

refugee situations, combined with a lack of disaggregation in donor and government reporting, make tracking refugee financing, particularly at scale, extremely challenging. As a result, efforts to quantify this information have been partial to date, leading to a lack of detailed analysis of financing for refugee situations.

comprehensive dataset and paper on financing for refugee education in low- and middleincome countries (LICs and MICs). By collating and analyzing publicly available data, surveying key refugee education donors, and working closely with host country governments and international organizations, all major sources of financing for refugee education in LICs and MICs are collated and quantified for the first time. This paper then analyzes this data to produce 10 key facts and findings on refugee education financing for LICs and MICs.

# Literature Review

<mark>Difculties in tracking donor and host government fnancing to refugee situations have</mark> led to a dearth of publications on refugee educatio <mark>n fnancing.</mark> As emphasized by Marcus et al. (2023), a “lack of disaggregation in global aid reporting systems by source, sector (subsectors), or type of crisis (e.g., internal displacement, refugee) limits analysis of funding on refugee inclusion [while] data on domestic expenditure in major refugee-hosting countries are often unavailable internationally” <mark>, hindering understanding and analysis (Marcus et al., 2023). These data challenges extend to the philanthropy sector, another signifcant source of refugee education fnancing, with many major foundations and funds electing not to publish their fnancing allocations, either by sector, country, or region (OECD, 2021; ECW, 2019).</mark> <mark>The lack of information on refugee education fnancing in LICs and MICs has created a scarcity of literature in this area. Yet data on fnancing for refugee situations has improved dramatically in recent years. Most notably, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveyed Development Assistance Committee members, participants, observers and partners on their fnancing for refugee situations in 2018, 2020 and 2023 (OECD, 2021, 2023). The second, and fnal, of these surveys asked donors to disaggregate their fnancing for refugee situations by sector, representing the frst time that data on sector-level ODA for refugee situations had been collected at scale, allowing the OECD to produce the frst sector-specifc estimates of ODA for refugee education in LICs and MICs</mark> (Hesemann et al., 2023). Hesemann et al. (2023) <mark>found education to be the third largest sector recipient of ODA for refugee situations in 2021, receiving US$ 2.3 billion, or 8% of total ODA for refugee situations in LICs and MICs. While this estimate is imperfect, and is improved upon in this paper’s analysis,</mark> Hesemann et al.’s work (2023) <mark>contributed signifcantly to improving transparency and the quality of data and analysis on fnancing for refugee situations.</mark> situations in LICs and MICs is scarce. Financing data on refugee education is neither publicly, nor internally, available for many LIC and MIC governments, with <mark>budget allocations seldom</mark> 3