Ayla Bonfiglio

Ayla Bonfiglio is the Regional Coordinator of the Mixed Migration Centre in North Africa. For the last decade, she has worked on issues of forced migration and mobility, with a focus on refugee educational attainment. In 2016, she co-founded the Conflict and Education Learning Laboratory (CELL) in the Netherlands, which works towards the reduction of divisive stereotypes in educational materials and examines the impact of educational content on conflict and crisis. She has advanced knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her PhD (UNU-MERIT/Maastricht University) examined how refugees and migrants who are pursuing tertiary education in asylum countries shape their forced displacement patterns in relation to higher education. In this role, she has conducted several hundred in-depth interviews with refugees and migrants in Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda. Formerly, she was a Research Officer at the International Migration Institute, Oxford. She has worked and carried out research in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, and Uganda. She has contributed to projects for GIZ, Samuel Hall, IOM, UNESCO, and UNHCR.