Our literature review revealed evidentiary gaps too, many of which we hope to address through this project, including: 

• Limited research focussing on refugee young adult learners accessing higher education (versus school age children); 
• The lack of research focussing on refugee education for adult learners based in countries in the Global South (rather than focussing on refugees who have travelled to contexts such as the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, or Europe); 
• An overall lack of conversation between debates in digital education and refugee education, and lack of literature critically addressing curriculum design; 
• The role of psychosocial support in refugee education, and how such support specifically relates to educational achievement and learning outcomes; 
• Overall, there were few detailed examples of projects like ours in the literature, so there was a general lack of comparable research models, although we believe we engaged with evidence from a variety of related projects and approaches.   

Despite the overall small number of research outputs focussing on adult refugee learners in the Global South, we learned from the refugee education literature more generally, and our literature review sub-team, which included scholar researchers, highlighted initial themes and findings which supported and enhanced our approach. A few of these initial themes that fed directly into programme design included: 

• The importance of developing teaching material that specifically suited the students’ needs (rather than repurposing existing material, as has been the case with previous partnerships); 
• Using concrete approaches to enhance refugees’ access to higher education, including measures relating to gender such as providing stipends to enable women to study; the importance of establishing a stable and safe physical classroom space that provides opportunities for structured learning without distractions; the need to schedule in self-directed study time and peer-to-peer study opportunities as part of the curriculum; and the need to centre psychosocial support within programme design; 
• The importance of participatory learning design and monitoring (which we made efforts to implement at all stages of our project); 
• Developing a socially and politically relevant pedagogy for refugees, such as curating curriculum to include political themes like teaching conflict history and engaging with scholarship on refugees in Uganda;
• The need to situate our project in relation to wider debates concerning the role and purpose of refugee education, with scholarship highlighting a variety of positions driving interest in refugee education including humanitarianism and rights-based approaches, national & regional security and counter-radicalisation, and economic development.

The team also recognised that much of the literature on refugee education has elevated quantitative and experimental methods above qualitative approaches, shaping the collective understanding of what ‘works’ in terms of educational interventions. Burde et al. (2017; 2015), for example, who have led several major systematic reviews on refugee education, argue that educational programmes can only be evaluated through ‘rigorous testing’, which requires an experimental design. They have referred to qualitative data as sketchy and anecdotal, and devalued sources of knowledge that cannot be empirically tested, including research that draws on students’ perspectives on educational interventions. As such, their definition of a ‘quality education’ remains relatively narrow, focused on either quantifiable outcomes and grades, or a counter-radicalisation and peace-building agenda. Our approach, in contrast, seeks to foreground situated knowledge and refugees’ perspectives, and thus to focus on outcomes informed more by experiential perspectives than international policy objectives.