Migrants and refugees
The aim of the project is to support countries in developing RVA policies, mechanisms, and operating systems that identify and make visible the skills, competences, and qualifications members of such groups possess, to enhance their employment and education prospects, as well as their active engagement in society.
Why migrants and refugees?
One of the major challenges migrants and refugees face in terms of education and skills development is that their prior learning and competences might not be recognized in the labour market and/or education system of their given host country. This issue is particularly acute for refugees who may lack physical documentation of their previous learning.
The RVA of non-formal and informal learning outcomes is key to enabling such individuals to continue their education and work, fostering inclusion in the typically restricted educational, socio-economic, political, and cultural settings they frequently encounter.
While specific initiatives have been implemented to improve the accessibility of RVA for newcomers, these have been limited to a relatively small number of countries. This makes it particularly important to take stock of what is currently working well and where there is room for improvement in this area.
Get involved!
Are you interested in strengthening RVA in your country, in a way that is inclusive of migrants and refugees?
UIL’s online course, Skillsets in Transit: Recognizing Prior Learning for Migrants and Refugees, seeks to equip national-level policymakers, practitioners and other key stakeholders across UNESCO Member States in contributing to the development and implementation of RVA systems that are open to people on the move. So far, students in Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Namibia, Viet Nam and other countries have benefited from this practical, online capacity-building offering.
Click here to register for the UIL Learning Hub where future editions of the course will become available.
Publications
Chapter 5: Digitalising RVA: The case of TVET for migrants and refugees
Chapter 5: Recognising Prior Learning Experiences of Migrants And Refugees for Inclusion
Addressing the needs of migrants and refugees for skills recognition and development at the national and local levels requires setting standards, developing mechanisms and coordinating actions. In recent years, UIL has made major progress in this field through:
- the UNESCO guidelines for the recognition, validation and accreditation of the outcomes of non-formal and informal learning (UIL, 2012), which provide a set of principles and key areas of action to assist countries in developing or improving structures and procedures to recognize the outcomes of all forms of learning;
- the ‘Global Observatory of Recognition, Validation and Accreditation of Non-formal and Informal Learning' (UIL, n.d.), which collates and disseminates best practices from RVA systems at different stages of development in order to contribute to policy and practice in UNESCO Member States;
- the ‘Global Inventory of Regional and National Qualifications Frameworks’ (Cedefop et al., 2017, 2019, 2023), a joint project between UIL, the Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems team at UNESCO Headquarters, the European Training Foundation (ETF) and the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) that analyses the implementation of learning pathways in 100 countries biennially;
- a UIL publication specifically targeting flexible pathways and RVA mechanisms for refugees, ‘Pathways to empowerment: Recognizing the competences of Syrian refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey’ (Singh, 2018), which stresses the importance of developing comprehensive RVA mechanisms for refugees as part of host governments’ ongoing education and training reforms in order to avoid fragmented and ad hoc projects.
