Ayla Bonfiglio

Discussend Regional Coordinator/Manager of the Mixed Migration Center in North Africa.

Dr. Ayla Bonfiglio is the Regional Coordinator/Manager of the Mixed Migration Center 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 doctoral research (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 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 obtained an MSc in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford and her dissertation on refugee non-formal education programs was published by UNHCR. Ayla holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science from Columbia University where she won the Charles Beard Prize for her dissertation on refugee self-reliance. She has worked and carried out research in a number of countries across North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and for a variety of organizations, including GIZ, ICMPD, IOM, UNESCO, UNODC, and UNHCR.