Dear Colleagues, Friends,
Strange as it may sound, the one thing I constantly hear from International Donor’s today…is their growing uneasiness that many education programs for refugees place too much emphasis on delivering quality education at the expense of their future employability.
They believe time has come to view refugee education as a long-term sustainability challenge whereby refugee students benefitted from both quality of education as well as enhancing their future career prospects…something which interestingly, is also a concern for students enrolled in higher education here in Europe today.
I am thus pleased that our Africa Mission 2020 program reached a critical milestone last week whereby ICEFIL/HU, MOI University, Kenyatta University and Windle Trust International now have a comprehensive education model providing pathway to quality education as well as a pathway to their future employability (see attached slide below).
There are couple of uniqueness about this dual pathway model:
- First and foremost, each refugee student enrolled in our teacher training program will finish with a recognized accelerated Diploma in teaching which they could use to find future
employment.
- Secondly, it addresses the growing challenge of using vocational training to help a generation of lost youths who have had no access to structured secondary school education in Kakuma.
We are preparing to launch a pilot whereby interested youths are first assessed via our online self-assessment tool to be placed in one of 9 vocational training classes to be run by either MOI University or Kenyatta University.
In each class, students are taught to pass the Kenyan National Grade III qualification and then Grade II and then Grade I when they reach full qualification.
- Finally, we also introduce the notion of ‘lifelong learning’ for adults who could use available support to either enhance their career prospects or learn a new career through ‘innovative learning’.
Again, I wanted to emphasize that our Africa Mission 2020 is a program of co-creation, co-learning and co-production so please contact us if you wanted additional information about this program and/or wanted to be involved in its delivery.
Sincerely,
Bijay Dhungana
ICEFIL Vice-President
