UNESCO urges universities to rethink migrant integration
Muleka (Glory) Ilunga was five when he fled the Democratic Republic of Congo for South Africa in 2005. The image that stayed with him was “being on the back of a truck, crying for my mother”.
Today, Ilunga is a masters candidate in sport science at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), having already earned two degrees there, and works as a strength and conditioning intern at Cape Town City Football Club.
On the sports field, he told University World News, the “weight of the refugee label” disappears. But he places even greater value on education.
“War and persecution destroy homes,” he said during an address to the World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) conference at UWC last November. “But education remains the one thing that cannot be taken away.”
Ilunga’s journey from the back of a truck to postgraduate study represents the promise of integration. For millions of others, however, structural barriers block the path.
It is this gap between individual resilience and institutional systems that a new open-access publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) examines.
System under strain
More than Welcome: Intercultural Integration of Migrants in and through Higher Education argues that universities must move beyond symbolic inclusion towards institutional transformation.
It was published in January and launched in Morocco at the inaugural Global Summit of NAFSA – the world’s largest professional body for international education – in late January.
The context is stark. According to data cited in the publication, more than 123 million people worldwide were displaced by the end of 2024. Yet only about 7% of refugees access higher education, compared with a global tertiary enrolment rate of over 40%.
In the foreword, Lidia Brito, UNESCO’s interim assistant director-general for natural sciences, frames migration not only as a “challenge” but as an “opportunity” for “human development, social cohesion, cultural richness and sustainable economic growth”.
But, she adds, this requires moving beyond “outdated integration models” towards “a new paradigm of intercultural integration – a multidirectional process engaging all community members”.
Special role for higher education
The publication assigns particular responsibility to higher education in fostering mutual respect and collaboration. By dismantling xenophobia and cultural discrimination, institutions can enable migrant learners to thrive in diverse societies.
Yet “welcome” alone is insufficient. Orientation sessions, bursaries and counselling do not mean transformed institutions. If migrant students must adapt to unchanged and unchanging campus cultures, integration remains one-sided.
The burden cannot rest solely with newcomers. Universities themselves must change – in governance, curriculum, pedagogy and student support.
More than Welcome proposes a five-principle framework to achieve this: shared responsibility for integration; reciprocity in intercultural integration; inclusive policies and practices; promotion of civics and human rights education through shared values; and citizenship reimagined towards participation and belonging.
“Simply bringing diverse students together does not mean they will also get along together,” the publication’s lead author, Dr Darla Deardorff, told University World News.
She holds the UNESCO Chair on Intercultural Competence at Stellenbosch University and is a research scholar at Duke University in the United States.
“There must be intentionality on the part of all stakeholders in coming together as a true community that celebrates identity, difference and belonging,” she said.
Universities as ‘catalytic spaces’
For many students, university is their first sustained encounter with difference. The publication describes institutions as “strategically catalytic spaces” whose practices can influence social cohesion beyond campus.
This influence extends beyond lecture halls. Through civic engagement, research, public scholarship and the graduates they send into labour markets, universities shape public discourse and institutional cultures more broadly. Intercultural integration, therefore, is both an internal reform agenda and a societal one.
The ambition is considerable, especially in light of rising anti-migration sentiment and polarised politics globally. Universities themselves are embedded in ideological tensions and funding pressures.
Deardorff acknowledges they are “messy, imperfect and deeply human” but insists they remain “learning laboratories” – and asks: “If not universities, then where?”
In the United Kingdom, the country’s second-largest city, Birmingham, hosts significant refugee and asylum-seeking populations. The University of Birmingham offers a practical illustration of the kinds of challenges the UNESCO framework seeks to address.
“We need to be honest about boundaries and constraints,” Professor Robin Mason, pro-vice-chancellor (international) and chair of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK, told University World News. “We are not insulated from external factors, and campuses can reflect social tensions as well as resolve them.”
From their participation in the European Union project, Being an Inclusive University for Refugee Students, Mason says three lessons emerged.
First, access is often “won or lost at the front door”. Early human contact, clear fee-status guidance and a named adviser are critical.
Second, support must be “wrapped, not bolted on” so students are not sent “from office to office repeating their story”.
Third, belonging matters as much as admission. “Peer mentoring, targeted academic skills support and trauma-informed wellbeing services can be the difference between persistence and drop-out.”
Birmingham embeds targeted refugee support within broader inclusion steps. Yet constraints remain.
“Sustained support costs money,” Mason said. Immigration and fee-status rules shift, creating friction and risk. “The challenge is not goodwill – that exists in abundance. It is building sustainable systems that work under constraint.”
Lessons from the South
According to global displacement data cited in the publication, the majority of displaced people are hosted in low- and middle-income countries, where universities face severe resource constraints. The publication highlights this imbalance: those hosting the majority of refugees often have the least capacity to expand tertiary access.
Yet intercultural integration is often practised informally in these contexts.
Deardorff argues that institutions in the Global North can learn from this by challenging deficit narratives.
“Migrants are co-educators,” she said. “Intercultural competence is relational. It emerges through daily interaction and lived experience, not necessarily through high-cost programmes.”
Ilunga’s experience at UWC reflects this. For him, university marked a shift from survival to service.
“As a refugee, you give 100%, but because of legal and social hurdles, you often need to give an additional 50% just to be recognised.”
At WAHED, he and Ivan Hirwa, originally from Rwanda and now a masters degree student at the University of Cape Town, said scholarships alone are insufficient.
Both received scholarships from the Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative (DAFI) Fund of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They stressed that camps, mentorship and structured community spaces were essential in fostering belonging.
Beyond pilot projects
The publication’s emphasis on reciprocity and shared responsibility echoes this experience. Integration is not charity; it is institutional design.
More than Welcome is clear that symbolic initiatives and short-term pilots are not enough. Sustainable funding, leadership commitment and policy alignment are required.
The framework challenges universities to decide what they are: passive mirrors of political anxieties or active architects of social cohesion.
Ilunga’s journey suggests that the answer matters far beyond a degree certificate.