Related Readings About Children Refugees and Highly Skilled Migrants

 

Save the Children: Keeping Children at the Centre

“In 2016, more than 100,000 children arrived in Europe, of whom over one-third were unaccompanied or separated from their families. In the same year, more than 63,000 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in the EU.  (…) Between 2015 and 2016, the number of children crossing via the dangerous central Mediterranean route increased by 71%, while the number of children travelling alone doubled.”

“There are almost no safe and regular routes for migrant and refugee children to reach safety in Europe. (…) Slow asylum processing procedures are driving children underground and forcing them to undertake dangerous journeys at the hands of smugglers. (…) UN agencies and NGOs have warned that a short-sighted focus on ‘stopping the flow’ will not be effective and creates long-term risks.”

However, several EU countries are receiving fewer asylum seekers now than in 2012-2013, before the crisis started. To improve the situation of migrant and refugee children on their way to or within Europe, Save the Children recommends taking action on four different priorities stated in their report Keeping Children at the Centre.

The report can be accessed here.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education: “Education for an Unknowable Future,” Unkowable Knowledge

“Many refugees will never return home. How can we prepare these children to succeed amid uncertainty?” This article by L. Shafer calls for the acknowledgement of an unknowable future to provide refugee children with the adequate tools to succeed in the countries where they are currently living, as well as the skills to thrive across contexts, including those that they cannot yet visualize.

Key needs — such as access to schooling, relationship-building with national students, empathetic teachers, an understanding of their history and the conflicts that affect them, flexibility and a learner-centered education — have to be taken into account in order to equip refugee children for productive futures in a context of deep uncertainty.

Click here to access the full article.

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Migrapreneurs: Transferring your Skills into Self-Employment

Migrapreneurs — Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Mindset Development for Highly Skilled Migrants in Europe —  is an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project running from September 2016 to August 2019 targeted at highly skilled migrants.

A guide has been developed under the wing of this project’s partners to help migrants and refugees living in Europe to improve their situation by setting up their own business. The full guide can be downloaded here.