Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is paving the way as one of the first American institutions to grant online degrees to students living in refugee camps.
Sixteen students in Rwanda graduated with associate’s degrees from SNHU in partnership with Kepler, a nonprofit university program based in Africa, in the Kiziba refugee camp. This makes the graduates the first students to earn a U.S.-accredited online associate’s degree while also living in a refugee camp.
The students’ graduation at the Kiziba camp marks the beginning of possibilities for economic and social mobility for the students; it is something unusual for displaced refugee groups.
SNHU reports that the refugee crisis has displaced 65.3 million people worldwide. Currently, only one percent of the refugee population has access to higher education, according to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Many of the people at Kiziba Refugee Camp, including most of the 16 SNHU students, have been living there for nearly 20 years, the university says. SNHU hopes to challenge what people think refugees can do and added an additional 25-student cohort at the Kiziba campus last year, bringing the total number of students served to 50.
“At SNHU, we believe that access to high-quality higher education is a fundamental human right,” according to a university publication by Chrystina Russell and Nina Weaver that was posted on June 20. “But today, as we celebrate our newest graduates on World Refugee Day, we are reminded that higher education continues to be out of reach for millions of refugees around the globe.”
Russell, who is vice president for Global Engagement at SNHU, and Weaver, who is director of Refugee Education Programs at SNHU, both coordinate and oversee the partnership between SNHU and Kepler. They note that as a result of the higher education gap for refugee populations, global inequality increases.
