York U project teaches Dadaab refugees to teach others

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Farhia Abdi, right, a York University teaching assistant at the Dadaab refugee camp, mugs for the camera with Rahma Dabasso Galgallo, one of her students and an Ethiopian refugee. Abdi, a popular T.A. who gabs with her Somali-born pupils in their native tongue, was born in Somalia and came to Canada in her teens more than 20 years ago before going on to become a doctoral student in education at York.

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Borderless Higher Education for Refugees project brings hope, especially for girls, in world’s largest camp for displaced people.

Sahra Mohamed Ismail peers into the smartphone camera. “Me, I will be a role model,” she says, seated easily at a classroom table, in a video shot to mark her graduation.

Around her, the arid plains of eastern Kenya are invisible to the lens, as is the broader state of limbo many inhabitants of the world’s largest refugee camp — Dadaab — find themselves in.

Ismail, 30, is one of 59 university-level students in Dadaab to have climbed the first of four rungs on the way to a bachelor of education degree. They earned a certificate of completion in education studies through a special program out of York University, though none could attend the ceremony Thursday afternoon, an ocean and a continent away. They did it without leaving the camp, Dadaab, which has been described as an open-air prison.

The teaching program has bloomed amid the sprawling, semi-permanent camp Ismail has called home for decades, with 300 students now enrolled.

The Somalia-born refugee began classes last year while pregnant with her now 8-month-old son. She says in the video she hopes the skills and knowledge she’s acquired will help boost the quality of education and change attitudes at Dadaab.

“In most of the refugee camps, girls are discouraged to be a teacher,” notes Ismail, who works without certification as a primary school teacher in the camp.

Two-thirds of her cohort teach locally. Only one in four secondary school students at the camp are female, according to York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. But nearly 40 per cent of its first teaching cohort are women.

The centre’s Borderless Higher Education for Refugees project has been on the ground in Kenya for just over a year. Teachers and graduate students from York as well as Kenyatta University, Moi University and the University of British Columbia conduct an intensive three-month course session, then teach via online classes the rest of the year.

The program aims to carve out a future for those who, like Ismail, hope one day to leave Dadaab, where roughly 350,000 refugees, most from war-ravaged Somalia, eke out an existence.

Wenona Giles, the centre’s deputy director who co-heads the project, says “it makes no sense” to ignore the thirst for education in places like Dadaab.

“It costs a lot more in terms of people’s lives if young people decide to go into dangerous and precarious forms of employment that contribute to ongoing violence,” she said.

Safety has improved recently in northern regions of Somalia such as Somaliland and Puntland, Giles says, making refugee repatriation a possibility.

“Many of them are already starting to go home, and they will be better educated to help in the reconstruction of their country,” she said.

“And they will also be better prepared … to resettle in Kenya and in other parts of the world, like Canada,” Giles added, calling on the country to take in more refugees in the wake of the crisis in Syria.

The project, funded by a $4.5-million contribution from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, is a partnership primarily between York, Kenyatta, Moi, and the University of British Columbia.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees plays a supporting role. Classes are held in a learning centre nearby paid for by the Canadian government and where students are frisked daily as they come in.

Giles said Moi, UBC, the University of Ottawa and the Technical University of Singapore are considering or already developing courses for refugee camp residents.

“The accomplishment of these students is powerful proof of one of the highest aims of education — and, in this sense, their remarkable story is in some ways shared by all of our graduating students — which is that an education holds the promise of a better life,” said York University president and vice-chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri.

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