With 50 percent of refugee children unable to attend school, we look at some of the leading thinkers on refugee education in the third installment of our “Experts to Watch” series.

Half of the world's child refugees do not go to school – some 3.5 million boys and girls with no access to education. Just 1 percent attend university.

Without an education, refugee children face a deck stacked against them. They miss out on the stability of attending school and the qualifications that will help them find work in the future. Refugee children without education opportunities are “more likely to undertake perilous journeys to Europe and other parts of the world, and are also more likely to be married early, exploited, trafficked and forced into work,” says Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children.

Child refugees face multiple barriers to getting education. They often don’t speak the language of the country they settle in. Some have to help provide for their families. Most refugees live in developing countries, where schools are already short on resources.

Tom Fletcher is a visiting professor of international relations at New York University and the global strategy director for the Global Business Coalition for Education, a branch of the international children’s charity Theirworld that seeks to harness private sector efforts to get millions of children into education. Fletcher was British ambassador to Lebanon from 2011 to 2015, and has worked tirelessly to increase education opportunities for Syrian refugees. “The battle to educate a generation is not about money alone, but a new, collaborative way of responding. A way of engaging business that is about corporate social results, not just corporate social responsibility,” Fletcher explained in a recent blog for the Huffington Post. Fletcher blogs as the Naked Diplomat, is the author of the book “Naked Diplomacy: Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age” and is on Twitter at @TFletcher.

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Photo description & credit: Rahma Hussein Noor sits in a classroom in Hagadera, one of the five camps of the refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, November 17, 2016. Anna Kerber/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.