Many women refugees find it difficult to integrate in Germany because they cannot read or write. The German government offers courses to empower these women to change their often isolated lives, but how successful are they?
Habiba from Afghanistan has a secret. She can’t write her name. Payman can also barely read and write. She went to school for two years before becoming a hairdresser and housewife.
Habiba and Payman are among the many illiterate women refugees who have a particularly hard time integrating into life in Germany. They told their stories to Deutsche Welle's Focus on Europe program.
Without the ability to read and write, they can’t do any of the things necessary to join society – opening a bank account, finding a place to live, even understanding what’s going on around them.
Payman is a 23-year-old Iraqi Kurd. She married at 14. Now she and her husband and three school-age children live in a refugee hostel in the German city of Cologne, where they mainly keep to themselves.
“I don’t have any German friends. I only know one person from Spain. I’d like to make German friends but I’ve never had the chance,” Payman says.
Habiba also has little contact with Germans. She’s only got to know one German at the refugee hostel.
“We’ve been friends with her for a year. When we have problems or get letters from the authorities, she helps us,” Habiba says.
Kept out of school
In the past five years, more than half a million women have arrived in Germany from crisis zones, where they may have received no formal education because of conditions of war or political unrest.
But many of them also come from countries with poor educational opportunities for girls and women. They may have been forced into child labor, or prevented from going to school because of their gender.
As a result, according to statistics cited in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, eleven percent of women arrivals in Germany are illiterate, and 17 percent have never been to school.
In addition, the majority of women refugees have never had a paid job – this is true even among Syrian migrants, whose level of education almost equals that of men.
Literacy courses
The German federal office for migration and refugees (BAMF) has long been aware of the need to help women like Habiba and Payman. For more than a decade, it has offered what it calls ‘low-threshold women’s literacy courses’.
Last year, the government tripled the funding for the program to more than 2 million euros a year. In the first half of 2017, around 43,000 people were enrolled through organizations across Germany, including
- Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO)
- Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband (DPWV)
- Internationaler Bund (IB)
- Verein für internationale Jugendarbeit (VIJ)
- Academia Espanola de Formacion (AEF)
The courses are designed to be as accessible as possible – any woman refugee over 16 can join, including those whose applications for asylum have yet to be decided on, and there are no exams. Participation is free and voluntary.
The participants learn about the district in which they live, how the healthcare and school systems work, and where they can find help in case of family violence, how to take the bus and how to open a bank account.
Fatma Yalcin, a literacy teacher at Lernstatt Berlin, says her aim is to get women out of their homes and learn about where they are living, to learn German, to meet other women and to be able to move around on their own and freely.
Kostan Rida is a Kurd who came to Germany seventeen years ago. Her husband didn’t want her to attend an integration course, but Kostan refused to stay at home and become isolated. She learned German and now helps other women immigrants. She says self-confidence is crucial.
“Many women who’ve been here a long time can understand German and even speak a little, they’re just afraid to,” Kostan says.
Are language courses working?
The courses being offered for women who lack literacy skills may not be as empowering as the government hopes. BAMF’s own figures show that less than 20 percent of illiterate refugees who take part in a language course achieve the minimum level required for a basic job or traineeship in Germany, with migrants from Eritrea and Iraq faring the worst.
One reason is that people without literacy find it difficult to cope with language courses, because learning a new script is especially hard when you have never learned to read and write in your own language.
In a report by the Goethe Institut, Alexis Feldmeier from the University of Bielefeld says it would be better to teach migrants to read and write in their mother tongue first.
But the problems go deeper than teaching methodology. According to Reinhard Merkel, a member of the German ethics council, more needs to be done than simply offering literacy courses. He says refugee women need more power within their families, which are often male-dominated.
Thomas Ritter, a BAMF spokesman, says the courses themselves are helping, but it will take time to affect a shift in cultural attitudes that disempower women.