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Unprecedented in scale and, with 16 million people already displaced and more living under the threat of displacement, the current crisis in the Middle East seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. The crisis is rare in that it largely affects middle income countries with fairly well developed education systems. The worst hit country is Syria, which now has more than four million refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and elsewhere in the region, and hundreds of thousands heading to Europe illegally. Additionally, nearly 8 million Syrians are internally displaced.

Pre-war, 93% of Syria’s children attended schools and some 25% of eligible youth attended tertiary institutions. But well over half of Syria’s youth in higher education are estimated to be displaced, unable to pursue their education due to insecurity or because their university facilities have been destroyed and their faculty scattered. There may be 200,000 “higher education qualified” Syrian students among the 12 million population of displaced.

Continue reading the article on the World Bank’s blog here.