Plight of Refugee Children – By Aditya Shrivastava, Lynnfield

Introduction

We all know about COVID-19 pandemic but there is one more pandemic spreading around the world which nobody is talking about. It’s a pandemic of refugee kids. Recent events/ wars and Syria, Afghanistan, Yeman have made things worse for refugees, especially child refugees.

Enough evidence shows that education is an absolute necessity in life. Without an education, people lack the necessary resources to move ahead in life and ensure their financial security as well as achieving their dreams. It should be a fundamental human right for every person to have an education, especially children refugees.

 Despite efforts to help refugees get a better education, there are still big gaps in refugee and non-refugee education. To give you a perspective on how much of an issue this is, 91% of non-refugees around the globe are educated, while a measly 63% of refugees are getting an education. “Of the 7.1 million refugee children of school age, 3.7 million – more than half – do not go to school”. The situation is only getting worse because of the lack of funding of education for refugee children. “The steep decline in refugee enrolment between primary and secondary school is the direct result of lack of funding for refugee education.”- UNHCR. 

Effects of COVID-19:

COVID-19 has been detrimental to the amount of refugees attending school. Due to the internet being inaccessible to most refugees, refugee children do not have any source of education during the pandemic. It is estimated that refugees are 50% less likely than the general population to have access to devices that can connect to the internet. Losing one and a half years of education puts refugee children at a greater risk of dropping out of school and pursuing higher education later in life. “In their recent “Girls’ Education and COVID-19” report, the Malala Fund estimated that half of refugee girls enrolled in secondary school before COVID-19 will not return due to lasting consequences of the pandemic.”

What can be done:

• Sending supplies and medicine to refugee camps 
• Help them to get asylum in a country that is willing to help them. 

How AI/Data science can help:

• We are creating an AI driven chatbot which will answer all asylum related countries. The chatbot will be multilingual so that it is accessible to everyone around the world. The chatbot will help them get their questions answered quickly. 
• Another way to utilize AI and data science to aid refugees is to know more about their refugee camps. Finding the number of refugees in a camp can be a daunting task. Data science and AI can help by using aerial images in order to estimate the exact number of refugees in a refugee camp.