The Inclusion Support Program for Refugee Education is supporting Chad in its efforts to integrate refugee students into its national education system. Copyright: UNHCR
In Chad’s Ouaddai province near the border with Sudan, 11-year old refugee student Aichatou says she wants to be a teacher. This favorite response of school children globally reflects both the protective role of education and the importance of teachers. For children experiencing forced displacement, school can provide stability, safe space, and human connection, while helping them build foundational skills for future livelihoods and jobs for self-reliance.
Chad currently hosts more than 1.5 million refugees, around half of whom are school-age children between 5 and 17. At the same time, Chad’s own population of school-age children is growing as part of a region-wide demographic trend, putting further pressure on an already resource- and capacity-constrained education system.
Despite these challenges, Chad’s Ministry of National Education, Bilingual and Civic Promotion in 2014 initiated a policy of integration of refugee students into the national education system. In practice, this means that refugee students can attend Chadian schools and follow the national curriculum
Integrating education systems for sustainability
The World Bank and UNHCR, with financing from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, are working together through the Inclusion Support Program for Refugee Education (INSPIRE) to support more than 15 refugee hosting countries to transition from costly and unsustainable parallel refugee education to inclusion of refugees children into national education systems. The INSPIRE program combines grant financing with technical assistance and capacity building focusing on practical approaches for inclusion. In Chad, the program has helped include more than 200,000 refugee children in national education systems of the Sahel, leveraging over $200 million in financing.
Integrating refugee students into national education systems—transitioning from humanitarian financing of parallel systems—requires tackling major resource constraints. In 2023, Chad spent 16.5 percent of all government spending on education, which is above the average for low- and middle-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the system remains under strain. Chad’s teacher workforce includes both civil servants, as well as around 38,000 community-based teachers, who make up about 65 percent of the workforce (Education Annual Statistical Yearbook for Chad, 2025). Salaries are often paid many months late, and schools lack sufficient textbooks and even enough seats for children.
To help address these challenges and enable children like Aichatou to stay in school, INSPIRE is improving coordination between UNHCR and the World Bank aligning advice to governments on inclusion, and supporting concrete actions based on enabling policy frameworks for refugee inclusion in education and long-term social cohesion. INSPIRE is supporting the development of a costed, sequenced inclusion plan, which will integrate teachers in refugee hosting areas into sector financing and budgeting processes, among other things. This will help the government of Chad to allocate resources to support refugee and host community-based teachers in the new education sector plan.
Alongside technical assistance and capacity building, INSPIRE supports refugee inclusion by leveraging and informing World Bank-financed education projects. The program is supporting the development of a remedial education initiative for refugee students, which will be implemented through the Chad Improving Learning Outcomes Project ($144 million). In addition, the Sahel Regional Engagement for Learning and Collaboration in Education Project ($137 million) aims to train more than 1,500 education planners, trainers, and managers, including women from Sahel countries, at the regional Institut du Sahel. This training is intended to strengthen education policy and management so that education systems in the Sahel can better respond to the needs of both refugee and host community students.
Building a sustainable system for refugee education
As international financing for refugee education declines, there is an urgency to shift from costly parallel refugee education to a more sustainable model of refugee inclusion in national education systems. The World Bank and UNHCR, with FCDO support, are helping to accelerate this transition so that more children like Aichatou can continue to learn and build a foundation for a more resilient future.
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