Effective education in post-war circumstances must be quick to start, flexible and able to provide the main educational elements even if there are not facilities in which to hold such schooling, BU research fellow Marc Sommers said yesterday in the African Studies Center.

Sommers specializes in education during emergencies and has published a book, ‘Fear in Bongoland,’ and currently has two more works on their way, he said. In the past year, Sommers has studied the education being provided to Southern Sudanese refugees for a paper commissioned by the World Bank, which has recently become a donor to aid in the development of education in post-war settings.

The seminar, entitled ‘Supporting Education During Wars: A Case from Southern Sudan’ focused on the issue of establishing a new training center for teachers in Kakuma, Kenya, a camp for southern Sudanese refugees.

Sommers said emergency education for these refugees in such times is usually set aside because of a scarcity of funds as well as a general belief that people will be reluctant to return to their homelands when threat disseminates if permanent schooling is provided for them.

‘It’s hard to put up a school in refugee camps,’ he told the audience. ‘Donors don’t want to use cement because then it will seem permanent and people won’t want to go home.’

Instead they put up more temporary-looking mud buildings for schools, he said.

Only recently have institutions, including the Scandinavian and British governments and the World Bank, started donating funds for development aid for refugees, including giving money for educational resources and training.

‘There needs to be a push for attention and investment for education for Sudanese kids,’ Sommers said, after pointing out that many of these people will probably never be able to return to their chronically unstable homeland.

Sommers, who has visited the educational centers for the southern Sudanese in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan, noted that the first emergency educators tend to be refugees themselves. Therefore, the most effective way to help education in these areas would be to ‘work to build on what they’ve already started and support their vision of education,’ he said.

A crowd of 15 people, professors and students alike, attended the talk, listening to Sommers and raised their own questions.

One said donors, such as the World Bank, contributing funds to the Kakuma operation worried that the training center could potentially attract people to the refugee camps and away from southern Sudan, where similar measures are being taken to develop educational opportunities in areas of current stability.

But based on his studies, Sommers told such donors this wouldn’t be the case and the plan for the teacher training program has since commenced.

Sudan, a nation that has been stricken with civil wars since achieving its independence in 1956, has 4.5 million forced migrants, people who are displaced by war without choice, Sommers said. This can include internally displaced persons, people who must cross borders, and people who want to leave but do not have the capability to do so.

Shelby Carpenter, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology, previously worked with Sommers and said that the seminar helped bring her up to date with the research she had done for him last summer.

‘It was a good talk … it raised a lot of important questions,’ Carpenter said.