Having endured militia attacks, weeks in hiding, an escape to a cold, distant country, years of peripatetic near-destitution and most recently a Christmas in detention, Adesole Adefowoju now faces a new problem: boredom.

At Yarl’s Wood, the detention centre for asylum seekers near Bedford in the UK, the Nigerian 10-year-old spends her days in the same lessons as her sister, Deby, seven, and brother Dapo, six. “They give us multiplication and even the five-year-olds can do them,” she sniffs.

It is their fifth school in two years. In the moments when the dread that flows from the constant threat of deportation subsides (and when she is not preoccupied with her ebullient eight-month-old daughter), their mother, Comfort, a teacher by profession, laments the damage to her children’s education.

Their stories are repeated globally. From the camps of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to the west’s temporary housing, the world’s 15m or so refugee children are, by accident or design, the group most likely to be excluded from education, dealing a further blow to an already precarious future.

Glaring holes in government policies are addressed in small, ad hoc ways by a patchwork of tireless individuals, church and community groups, non-governmental organisations, United Nations agencies and, on occasion, big business.

“After primary needs – clean water, food, sanitation and shelter – education is a very high priority” for refugees, says Jill Rutter, an immigration expert at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a London-based think-tank.

Apart from its intrinsic benefits, schooling is key to the long-term wellbeing of refugee children, she adds, whether it be by providing the security that a group identity and a uniform afford, or by helping them evade such perils as landmines, trafficking and recruitment as child soldiers. In practice, however, schooling in refugee camps and urban refugee settlements has been increasingly neglected.

Those refugees who flee to the developed world might expect easier access to education. Many western countries theoretically extend rights to schooling to refugees from the moment they claim asylum. However, in the UK alone, Ms Rutter estimates that 1,600 asylum-seeking and refugee children go uneducated.

A recent European Commission report found serious flaws in the provision of education to asylum seekers in 11 of the European Union’s 27 member states, including France, Italy and the UK. Even those granted refugee status face inadequate services, particularly in language-teaching, experts say. Furnished with scant explanation of the workings of their host country’s education system, refugees can find accessing schooling for their children baffling.

In the US, a large, co-ordinated network of charities and NGOs, monitored and partly funded by the state department, assists the tens of thousands of refugees who arrive each year in resettlement programmes by, for example, securing school places for children. However, the state department says resettled refugees account for only 1 per cent of the global total.

Businesses are beginning to contribute to plugging the gap, particularly by bolstering the capacity of voluntary groups and charities. KPMG’s UK foundation started to invest in child refugees’ education in 2000 due to a lack of business sponsorship in the field, says Neil Sherlock, partner.

Working in collaboration with the UK’s Refugee Council, the accounting group has invested about $1.5m in projects aimed at influencing government policy for the inclusion of refugee children in schools.

In an example of the difficulty the private sector faces in intervening in this most politically sensitive of areas, efforts by another of the Big Four accountancy firms, PwC, to deploy its staff to instruct young Burmese refugees in Thailand in elementary business skills have been blocked by the Thai government, says Richard Golding, who manages the firm’s relations with UN bodies.

Outraged campaigners accuse governments of repeatedly seeking to use access to education as a lever to repatriate refugees. “Closing schools in camps is used as a ‘push factor’ [to press refugees to return home] all over the world, usually on the initiative of the host government. The UNHCR has few rights to object,” says the IPPR’s Ms Rutter.

Ron Pouwels, senior adviser for refugee children at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, blames the removal of education in some camps on the logistical difficulties of managing repatriations rather than government intervention.

Agencies say they face the problem of camps being seen by those living near them as providing “luxury”. “If we are going to fund secondary education, we have to be sure that it is already available through the state system to the host communities or that they can access services within the camps,” Mr Pouwels says.

Often, the burden of hosting refugees falls on countries that are scarcely able to provide for their own.

Jordan, for example, has a population of about 6m and has been struggling to meet the basic needs for the more than 1m Iraqis it hosts. The government has pledged to offer schooling to all child refugees but those who have been out of education for more than three years are ineligible.

In Jordan, as in many other host countries, many refugee children fall through the cracks in state provision. “We are the only group helping kids who wouldn’t be able to go to school,” says Joy Portella of the Mercy Corps, a US-based charity working in Jordan. “We are filling those gaps where kids could be left without education.”

Big business in class action

There are two ways to view the move by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to enlist the private sector to help bring education to the estimated 15m children who have been driven from their homes by violence, hunger and natural disasters. It is at once a ray of hope in blighted lives and a crushing disappointment.

Born of a desire to harness big business to the cause of raising awareness of child refugees’ plight and helping to raise the funds needed to ameliorate it, Ninemillion.org is part of UNHCR’s efforts to expand the meagre schooling available to displaced young people, with a target of reaching 9m by 2010 at a cost of $220m.

But the body’s decision to seek long-term partnerships is also an indictment of the failure of the international community to prevent, or at least resolve, the conflicts that create refugees.

The Ninemillion campaign began in earnest when Olivier Delarue, head of the UN body’s corporate and foundation partnership unit, dragged a group of executives to the camps of east Africa in March 2006.

The companies represented – including Nike, Microsoft and Manpower – were all members of the Council of Business Leaders, formed at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos to advise the UN’s refugee commissioner.

Since then, it has raised more than $2m through individual donations generated via a global marketing campaign and a snazzy website, matching grants from multinational corporations and auctions of merchandise including trainers designed by Eminem, the Detroit rapper.

That cash goes some way to filling the hole in UNHCR budgets that has opened up over the past three decades, during which refugee numbers have soared, forcing the organisation to cut back schooling in the camps it runs to basic primary-level lessons in order to fund even more basic needs such as shelter and clean water.

“Today the situation is bleak,” Mr Delarue says. “Our funding of education has been dwindling. Without education, there is no future.” The plan, he says, is to broaden secondary education and offer more university grants, as well as to raise access to sport and technology and help girls into schools.

While Nike has fulfilled a pledge to match $1m in individual donations, the companies’ role is not primarily financial.

Pamela Passman, Microsoft’s vice-president of global corporate affairs, says: “We know that our expertise is in creating software and tools – so we work with non-profits operating in local communities who are the real local experts.” Using the software giant’s MSN messaging service helps channel tens of thousands of visitors to Ninemillion’s website every month.

On the same logic, Nike has supported Ninemillion by, among other initiatives, donating its considerable expertise in branding and designing a football that could withstand the conditions in a refugee camp. Manpower, one of the world’s biggest recruitment companies, offers business expertise and vocational training, but it has also often gone beyond those provisions by leaned on governments that host refugees to allow them to work.

“More and more we find that governments do listen to the business community,” says David Arkless, vice-president of global affairs at Manpower. “We make a big contribution to their economy so they have to listen to us.”

Mr Delarue says: “UNHCR in the past was not the best at implementing projects funded by private sector donors.” Improving that implementation, he adds, “is the role of the business partners”.