Borderless Higher Education for Refugees: Lessons from the Dadaab Refugee Camps

Review
“This book provides an honest and highly reflective account of the design and implementation of a higher education in emergencies project. The BHER story is told with a degree of humbleness and modesty regarding the inherently problematic initiative of a Northern/Western University to bring together a consortium/partnership with universities in the South and how it successfully navigated unequal power relations and neo-colonial patterns of thinking and acting.” ―Barbara Moser-Mercer, Visiting Professor, University of Nairobi, Kenya
Higher education is increasingly recognized as crucial for the livelihoods of refugees and displaced populations caught in emergencies and protracted crises, to enable them to engage in contemporary, knowledge-based, global society. This book tells the story of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project which delivers tuition-free university degree programs into two of the largest protracted refugee camps in the world, Dadaab and Kakuma in Kenya. Combining a human rights approaches, critical humanitarianism and a concern with gender relations and intersecting inequalities, the book proposes that higher education can provide refugees with the possibility of staying put or returning home with dignity. Written by academics based in Canada, Kenya, Somalia and the USA, as well as NGO workers and students from the camps, the book demonstrates how North-South and South-South collaborations are possible and indeed productive.