Assets, Not Liabilities: The Investment Case for Financing Higher Education for Africa’s Refugees
GABORONE, BOTSWANA — Africa is home to 45 million displaced people, 15 million of them young. For most development conversations, that number signals a burden. For a room full of ministers, university leaders and UN officials gathered in Gaborone, it signalled something else: an untapped workforce waiting for the one investment that could turn displacement into dividend — higher education.
At a high-level dialogue convened during the 21st RUFORUM Annual General Meeting in 2025, the message from Uganda’s Commissioner for Refugee Management, Patrick Okello, set the tone for the entire session: refugees should be seen as contributors with the potential to enrich host economies and societies, not as liabilities. It is a reframing that development financiers, still largely structured around emergency relief, have been slow to fully embrace — and this gathering argued that it can no longer wait.
A Crisis With a Compounding Cost
The scale is hard to ignore. UNICEF estimates over 4.4 million children of primary and lower-secondary age are displaced across Sub-Saharan Africa. At the tertiary level, the disruption is just as severe: conflict in Sudan alone has displaced nearly 400,000 university students within a year, many now stranded in neighbouring host countries. Historically, only 1% of refugees globally accessed tertiary education. Collective efforts led by UNHCR, RUFORUM and partner universities have pushed that figure to 9%, real progress, but still a fraction of the continental target of 15% by 2030.
Behind the statistics were the voices of ministers living the crisis directly. Sudan’s Minister of Higher Education, Ahmed Mudawi Musa, described universities turning to digital and open distance learning simply to keep displaced students connected to their studies. Chad’s Minister, Tom Erdimi, spoke of three decades of hosting refugees from Sudan and Cameroon, and of Sudanese academics now strengthening Chadian classrooms. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Marie-Thérèse Sombo Ayane Safi Mukuna framed education, even amid ongoing conflict, as “a symbol of dignity and hope” central to national recovery.
Proof That Investment Pays Off
What distinguished this dialogue from a typical crisis briefing was its focus on mechanisms that already work — and simply need capital to scale. Muni University in Uganda showcased a consortium model that skills refugees who don’t meet standard university entry requirements through a “chartered pathway”: practical skilling, followed by scholarships, followed by formal accreditation. UNESCO’s global accreditation tools already allow displaced learners to transfer credits and continue studies across borders. RUFORUM itself has pledged to support 300,000 refugee and displaced students, while the Mastercard Foundation reported it has already directly supported 1.1 million refugees through education, skills and livelihood programmes, with 349,000 more expected to gain access by 2040 through its interventions.
Host countries offered their own evidence. Botswana’s Minister of Higher Education, Prince Maele, noted that 49% of the country’s higher education budget already goes toward technical and vocational training — a national bet on skills that the country is now extending to refugees. Uganda’s integrated hosting model, which gives refugees and host communities joint access to education, was repeatedly cited as reducing social tension while building local economies.
The Ask: Move From Pilots to Predictable Financing
The dialogue’s clearest conclusion was structural: refugee education in Africa remains dependent on fragmented, short-term, country-specific funding. Participants called for a continental financing pool dedicated to refugee education, standardised academic mobility frameworks, and a new continental task force — chaired by Gulu University and including UNHCR, the African Union and the Mastercard Foundation — to coordinate what has so far been a patchwork of national efforts.
For funders weighing where a dollar goes furthest, the case laid out in Gaborone was direct: education is the most sustainable tool for economic empowerment and resilience among displaced populations, converting today’s emergency caseload into tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, health workers and agricultural innovators. As the African Union’s Gaspard Banyankimbona put it, this crisis is also an opportunity — one where institutions, governments and financiers can co-create the systems that turn 15 million displaced young people from a line item in a humanitarian budget into a continental economic asset.
