Project Access for Refugees
Project Access for Refugees
Hi everyone, I’m Sofia and I’m the head of Project Access for Refugees, a position I have held since the late spring of 2019. Back then the team, founded half a year earlier, was still fumbling for its identity. We were mainly focusing on research to learn whether it would be useful at all with a program within PA specifically designed for refugees, and if so, what such a program would look like. This blog post is the brief story of how we eventually started figuring that out and of how our program has developed from then until the recent end of our first pilot.
While we were still conducting our research, a student, a Burundian refugee in Mahama Refugee Camp in Rwanda, had taken his final secondary school exam at a school in the camp. When he received his results, he learned that he had gotten a perfect score, he wasn’t only the best student in his school or in the camp, but in the whole country. He wanted to continue to higher education but didn’t see any opportunity to do so. He is not the only refugee student finding himself in this situation, according to UNHCR only 3% of refugees currently have access to tertiary education.
This student’s story was shared on a local radio station and by coincidence one of the people listening to the broadcast that day happened to be a Global Shaper in Kigali who had himself previously been a refugee in the Mahama camp. This Global Shaper happened to know of a Global Shaper in London who was working with some access organisation. The organisation in question was Project Access and the global shaper our CEO at the time. Through the continuation of this chain of events I came to ad-hoc mentor this refugee student in the Mahama Camp together with another PA team member.
The student eventually ended up going to university and also became a team member of Project Access for Refugees. Furthermore, his case drew our attention to a context where there were lots of brilliant refugee students who, for different reasons, lacked access to higher education. In other words, we saw an opportunity to try to achieve what PA as a whole is trying to achieve – to let passion and potential define a young person’s future and to level the playing field for students from less privileged backgrounds. On top of that this opportunity was set in a refugee context and with that PA4Refugees had found a location for its pilot and its raison d’être.
Developing the program was a balance act between tailoring the program to this particular context and not straying to far from the tested PA model – we knew that what we are good at are peer-to-peer mentorships and scaffolding students through an application process and we had to continuously remind ourselves of what kind of support it would be useful for us to provide and what kind of support was better left to a partner with a different field of expertise. We also learnt a lot about preferences and how many of our assumptions had to be tested before we ended up with a program that catered to the wishes of our mentees rather than the wishes that we assumed they held.
Through the invaluable expertise of the team member from the camp and the feedback we started requesting from our mentees we developed everything from how we communicated and which tasks we distributed to what the end goal and who the people who could best help them get there would be. As a distinct program with a distinct target group and with operations not entirely identical to those of the rest of the organisation, we also had to start making intrapreneurial considerations and develop our own version of impact measurement, understand what our theory of change looked like, define our solution and understand our needs in terms of both human and financial capital. Being selected to be part of UNLEASH, an Innovation lab for SDGs where we received expert advice, learning from the experiences of knowledgeable people within and outside our organisation and getting support from HEMPEL Foundation to realise some of our ambitions was crucial for this.
We ended up with a program where most of the 20 students we worked with applied to African Leadership University in Kigali after receiving peer-to-peer mentoring and support with their university- and scholarship applications. So far 7 students have received offers and scholarships to start studying in the upcoming academic year. To us this was both a fantastic result for our pilot and an opportunity to continue improving our program for the second cohort of students. We are currently working on improving every part of the support we offer as well as learning about more contexts where our solution could hopefully be applied in the near future. While the identity of PA4Refugees will probably continue to develop just like refugee contexts everywhere are varied and dynamic, we have matured a bit since the fumbling start and we have established ourselves as an intrapreneurial branch within the organisation that at the same time dedicates itself strongly to the cause at the core of the organisation. We are taking with us these experiences and we are excited to continue to learn and to continue to strive to scaffold brilliant refugee students to realise their potential.