A conversation with Amala alumnus, Emmanuel, about the power of education
“Amala has been the most powerful education in my life.” - Emmanuel, Amala Changemaker Course alumnus
Emmanuel joined the Amala community back in 2019 as a student on our Peacebuilding course. He went on to join two more Amala courses (Social Entrepreneurship and Ethical Leadership) and is now working on his own project that aims to promote equality of opportunity, advocate for those in need, and provide practical skills to people in Kakuma.
Emmanuel is keenly aware of the many issues that refugees face in the camp, and is passionate about uniting people in these communities and bringing about change. He hopes to someday be able to bring his project, HAED (Human Advocacy Empowerment Development) back to his native country of Uganda, and to continue to create positive changes in his communities. Emmanuel firmly believes that “great people are people always ready to learn and then give back to their community, in spite of racism, and discrimination, without expecting anything in return,” and strives to be such a person.
Resonating with Amala’s belief in the life-changing effects of education, and after working as an Amala facilitator, Emmanuel continues to work with students through the OSUN and Amala’s partner, URISE Initiative for Africa.
We sat down with him Emmanuel find out more about his momentous work in bettering the communities through his many projects.
Tell me a bit about your experience at Amala. Is it similar to other educational programmes you have participated in?
I discovered Amala while I was researching what kind of education is good for refugees in the Kakuma context. Amala is a home where the students can feel they can express their ideas and contribute to discussions, interact with each other at the learning centre and get involved with solving practical problems and collaborating in many other projects in class. Most people think of education as you going to class and writing whatever they tell you to and speaking about it, or something like that. Amala is different. The Amala course is not just about learning, but also about engaging students in practical problems that affect refugees; especially in Kakuma, where there are many different problems in the communities, and many communities within the camp at conflict. So Amala opens its students' minds and gives them better ways of thinking, more critical ways of viewing things and problem solving skills that they can then transfer to solve such issues. An example is a course like Peace Building, where you learn how to negotiate a problem, to engage two parties in dialogue and general conflict management. It’s a more practical education.
“Amala is a home where the students can feel they can express their ideas and contribute to discussions, interact with each other at the learning centre and get involved with solving practical problems and collaborating in many other projects in class. ”
How did Amala help you get to where you are now?
I’ve been delighted with my few years with Amala, and it’s really led me to where I am today. I think that for me Amala has been the most powerful education in my life. They can speak on behalf of the people in the community who cannot speak for themselves. Because in Kakuma we have so many people who are very vulnerable, and who sometimes fear to speak about what is affecting them.
Something I really love about Amala is that they are able to see someone’s suffering and try to speak out on these people’s behalf. Kakuma has local leaders called stockholders. So Amala has also prepared me on how to talk to stockholders, and involve them where they are needed in the decision-making process when they are trying to handle cases in their own context and communities, and in cases apart from them. Amala also prepared me to analyse problems, because some are quickly resolved, while others require more time to reach a conclusion; it all depends on the case. For example, if I find a problem in the community, then maybe I can mobilise some youth and find a way to get funding for the project to support that community or issue. Amala has really prepared me for such things.
Tell me about your project. Did you continue working on it after the course?
The project that I developed in class is called HAED (Human Advocacy Empowerment Development). We included ‘human’ in the acronym because it’s seeing the human being in everyone, and treating them fairly, equally, ethically. ‘Advocacy’ refers to something that’s now become important for me: speaking out for those who cannot speak for themselves, (such as women, who in Kakuma are most vulnerable), and protecting their rights as humans. ‘Empowerment’ is about giving people an equal chance, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, mental or physical disability. Things like this need to be understood. Lastly, ‘development’ represents our efforts to teach people basic survival skills; life as a refugee is not easy, so training young people who aren’t able to go to school, and therefore not get work, with basic skills allows them to find ways to make a living.
After I completed the Amala course I was so passionate about my project that I decided to research how the project could best meet the needs of the community. That’s when I found that the stockholders were interested in joining me on the project. This is important because you cannot run or finance a project in a community without consulting the leader; they need to be aware of what you’re doing to make the project official. So we decided to work with them, even now when we don’t have a lot of money to sustain the project, but at least with our participants we can manage the small things, like affording water.
What kind of activities does HEAD do?
Some of the activities they do with us in this project are the same ones we ran in my other project, Sport for Peace, where we engaged young people to play games. That way they interact, learn about each other's cultures, build rapport; and then because of those experiences they stop conflict in the refugee camps.
Another thing we did was a counselling and mistreatment project. Understand that refugees have a lot of trauma, so it’s good that we work with the community and provide counselling, telling people what they need to work on, and things like that. We also did a mentorship project for underage mothers. We discovered that there are many young people, young girls, who are 17 years old, 15 years old who are getting pregnant because they need money, and who end up dropping out from school. We’ve made it our responsibility to talk to them, especially about education, and encourage them to go to school.
“All the skills and knowledge and all the things I gained from Amala gave me a lot of pathways and opportunities, such as to study in different universities and to all the jobs that I have. Where I work, and where I’ve been working, all came along with the skills and experience I got from Amala. So Amala has really been a huge thing for me.”
Is this connected to your work with OSUN and URISE?
HAED is not, it’s a personal project I’ve been doing for almost three years since graduating from Amala, and it’s the project that I really want to push. I am trying to develop it every day, and I hope to implement it in my own country, in Uganda. You know, sometimes we don’t get the chance to stay in a country, so I might be sent back or might be going back to Uganda while I’m still completing my education, so that is the project I am trying to work on.
OSUN is a company that hired me to work for them. It stands for Open Society University Network and is an online programme divided into two phases, RhEAP and cluster programmes. RhEAP stands for Refugee Higher Education Access Program, and is a bridge programme that prepares refugee students for university; while cluster students are already qualified and ready to take a BA. So OSUN has leaders based in Kakuma and my main responsibility is being a supervisor, liaising with the OSUN facilitator and supporting the students, with their work, with technical issues or whatever.
Emmanuel presenting students at URISE with their Amala certificate
At URISE I work as an education programme manager, and what I do is monitor the partnership between URISE and Amala. I provide the capacity building with the Amala facilitators, because improving this is something that Amala is really pushing for. For Amala I also completed a survey where I asked Amala alumni for feedback on how to improve Amala’s learning programmes. Apart from that we are also looking to build the student performance, to see how students are progressing, what kind of conflicts they have; because as URISE education managers, we want to see if we can then enable a response and work on a proposal to help the students, to see how to make URISE activity most effective and how to secure more funding.
“The more I got involved with education, the more my perception started to change about things and about education itself. Personally, as a refugee, I think the only thing able to change me, change my life is education.”
You’re very involved in education. Do you think that the Amala programme, or pursuing further education in general, has changed your perception of the value of education?
Yes, of course. I used to work as a Protection Monitor before coming to teaching. So I was working on more refugee cases, worker cases, providing counselling, things like that. Then I started getting into teaching, doing and studying teaching, and the more I did it the more fascinating it got, so I decided to quit protection and come to education. The more I got involved with education, the more my perception started to change about things and about education itself.
Personally, as a refugee, I think the only thing able to change me, change my life is education. That’s why I am so involved in educating myself and others. I cannot rely on UNHCR for a resettlement and I cannot think of going back to where I came from. If I go back without a document, without skills, I cannot survive. So, I have to perfect my skills, and then after I feel like I’ve become an expert, I can return to Uganda and be able to find something with which I can support my family and my people. I think that’s why education is meaningful, in a very different way, to me.
To follow Emmanuel’s work in Kakuma check out his Linkedin here.