New schools bring hope to refugee children
PwC's Global Leader for Corporate Responsibility Rick Millen, and his colleague Kathryn Wightman-Beaven sat down for an interview after their visit to the four refugee camps in Chad where PwC and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) are working together to educate refugee children who have fled the conflict in Darfur.
Q: What was the purpose of your trip to Chad?
Rick Millen: Our project, Educating the children of Darfur, raised more than $4 million to help educate refugee children. We visited the camps to see first-hand how the money is being spent and what is being accomplished. We knew from the beginning that it would be very hard to understand what was happening on the ground unless we could go there and see the situation with our own eyes.
Kathryn Wightman-Beaven: For the past 12 months we've been working with the UNHCR from a distance -- primarily through Geneva -- to make sure that it's managed OK, that the funds are being distributed appropriately, that the proper systems and controls are in place. That's the technical side. But the other objective was to get a better understanding of the broader context. When we started this project we knew there was a need for education, but what we didn't really understand were the social and family needs and why education is so important.
Q: What was the security situation like? Were you ever in danger?
RM: When we traveled to the camps from the off-site centres where we were staying we were escorted by armed vehicles. The first time we went out we actually had a tank trailing us. If you go outside the compound and the towns, you see a lot of flat-bed trucks with machine guns on top, people carrying AK47s and grenade launchers. You couldn't tell whether they were Chadian army, or whether they were militia… whoever they were, there were some very young soldiers amongst them. A lot of them didn't look much more than 14 or 15. And whilst we never ever felt threatened by any of them, there was just a slightly different environment from walking down the street in Sydney.
KWB: You certainly come away with a greater appreciation for the remarkable work done by the UNHCR people. Imagine needing an armed convoy just to get to your job every job. They're at risk from the time they leave the guest houses in the morning to get to the camps to the time they return at night. There's constant physical and mental stress.
Q: What are the camps like?
KWB: The camps are pretty big; it takes some time to walk from one side of the camp to the other. When you look out over the camp, in every direction, there's just desert. Nothing else. There's nowhere to go. Inside the camp each family has their own place about the size of a normal business office. The home is immaculate -- the rattan mats are perfectly kept, you take your shoes off at the front door, the kitchen is swept out beautifully, there's a stove in the middle, and a little play area for the children with all the toys put away neatly in boxes - there's no disorder. You get the sense that in the camp, the typical male/female roles are reversed and the woman of the house is the one in charge. She's the one organizing the children to be active, to actually have a life in the restricted environment that they're in. Every day the children go to school in the morning. And then because there's no electricity or running water they need to take a donkey and go and get firewood and water outside of the camp which means putting themselves in danger because the militia is active outside the walls of the camp. They also have to look at opportunities for generating income. Can they sell goods in the markets? Can they trade?
RM: There's really not much for the people in the camps to do. They are just waiting for their lives to get back to some sense of normalcy. The UNHCR provides food and a small amount of water. There's a small market. But there's not much work in the camps and there's almost no opportunity of getting any work outside of the camps, because there's nothing outside of the camps to work at. There is a bit of commercial activity - not everybody who becomes a refugee immediately becomes destitute. So some people do have some resources. There's a surprising number of mobile phones in the camp.
Q: What does the man of the house do?
KWB: Not a great deal by the looks of it. He just tends to go down to the market and have a bit of a chat with his mates. Back in Darfur before the families fled the man was very much the head of the household. He would be the main breadwinner and the wife would probably be looking after the children and so forth. The man may well have had a job depending on what level of education he had. But now in the camps the man feels completely disempowered because he doesn't have a job, he doesn't have that role that makes him feel central to the family, and so the woman automatically takes control. We met one lady and I asked her, "Who built this house?" and she said "I did". "What about your husband?" "He didn't do anything. He just sat there." The house was built entirely out of mud, from the bottom up, and the woman had done it all.
Q: Is there anything being done to get men more involved?
KWB: Actually the school project is helping the men get their role back in society. A lot of the men are getting involved in construction, others are becoming teachers. To be fair, many of the men just didn't know how to respond to the situation. Their world was turned upside down. This new social hierarchy with women taking the more dominant role has been a mixed blessing for women. We met one woman who was a nurse back in the Sudan and halfway through our meeting she stood up and pulled out all of her nursing certificates from her cupboard and proudly showed them to us. Unfortunately she can't be a nurse here because the camp health centre is operated by Medicens Sans Frontieres. So, although she has the dominant role now, there's something missing in her life because she not's able to be a nurse anymore.
RM: The desire of almost everyone in the camps is to return to their homes in the Sudan. They haven't had the chance to build anything in the camps because it's just a day to day survival. Even if they had, they couldn't take it with them - they wouldn't be allowed to. The only thing that they can take with them is their children's education. And if their children can't bring an education back with them, then they're actually wasting their lives in the camps. They're just sitting there waiting for their lives to be able to resume. It's like taking a time out, only the time out for them has lasted six or seven years already with no prospect of coming to an end.
Q: Education seems to be more of a critical issue, true?
RM: That's exactly right. Many of the refugees told us they believe that if they had had a better education before the trouble started, they would have been better able to defend themselves and get the word out to the international community about what was happening, how they were driven from their homes, and the terrible treatment they received along the way. Because the people in the camps connect so strongly with education, they are very excited about this project. They really feel the project makes a difference to what they're doing with their lives when they're in the camps.
KWB: One of the great things about this project is although we're only supporting four of the camps, there are actually 12 camps in eastern Chad. So, although the school construction and outfitting is only taking place in four camps, teacher training is happening across all 12 camps. Therefore the educational standards for the children will rise across all of the refugee camps.
Q: What progress have you made so far?
KWB: There's been a lot of progress. There are four new wonderful schools that have been built. The old schools meant that the children studied outside under trees in the harsh weather. Now they have these great big airy schools that have been designed to deal with the heat -- they're white, they have shutters, they're not in the wind, etc. Besides the physical plant, we've trained and accredited all the teachers. Each has a passport that indicates what level they are at -- A, B, or C. A means introductory teacher, B intermediate and C, more advanced. They all have their own uniforms too - white top, black pants, which they wear with tremendous pride. Absolutely immaculately white.
RW: When you fly in over the camps the school buildings really stand out. They're very impressive structures, built of concrete with proper corrugated roofing built to last for 60 years -- hopefully a lot longer than the refugees will actually be here. We got them completed just in time for the start of the school year. So now you're going to have kids who are able to sit on benches and actually have school books, and exercise books, and writing implements, and the teacher will have a proper blackboard. It's a very different teaching environment from what they had before.
Q: When the refugees go home what will happen to the schools?
RM: The local Chadian government will inherit the infrastructure, but in the meantime, the local Chadian children are unable to attend the schools.
Q: Why?
RM: Unfortunately UNHCR only has the mandate to assist the refugees. The locals are the responsibility of the Chadian government. But the Chadian government either doesn't have the resources, or chooses not to use the resources on the people in these really remote areas. The local authorities were very sensitive to the fact that we were building a fairly substantial infrastructure for the refugees that would not be available to the Chadians. Although the lives of the refugees are really about as harsh as you can imagine, from a material sense, they're actually better off than the local Chadian population. Because it's an extraordinarily dry area, with the capacity to support very small numbers of people, the UN feeds and provides small amounts of water and firewood to the refugee camps. However, the local Chadians are not receiving that assistance - they have to survive as they ever did, with the additional pressure on the environment of having thousands of refugees here.
Q: Did building the schools involve some of the Chadian people?
RM: Yes, in fact we've seen the best results when the construction work was undertaken by a Chadian contractor who accessed the local community for labor.
Q: What was the interaction like with the refugees?
KWB: When we arrived the first day we were greeted by a number of women singing "Welcome, welcome, PwC! Thank you PwC!" followed by a military parade to welcome us to the camp. It was almost like a celebrity visit. I sometimes thought that Angelina Jolie was along with us. The refugees were definitely surprised by the amount of time we spent with them. Most celebrities, or government officials, fly in, do a couple of camps, and fly back out again. But we stayed and talked with the teachers and the community leaders. They see the schools, and the new desks and books, and they see that we are committed to them.
RM: Because the people in the camps connect so strongly with education, they are very excited about this project and very proud of it. They also have lots of suggestions about what more we could do, because this does only nick the surface of all the challenges that exist in the camps.
Q: What's the biggest challenge from an educational standpoint?
RM: I think the biggest challenge is making this work over a sustainable period. Of course building the schools has been a challenge. This is a remote, extraordinarily difficult location. It would not have been surprising if the project failed, if the schools didn't get built, if corruption took over. But still, a school is just a means to an end. We need to ensure that the education is maintained over a considerable period, that the standard of education continues to improve, that we increase the transferability of the education so that people are getting qualifications that can be recognized elsewhere, and that the children stay in school -- that parents are prepared to make sure their children attend school, that young girls don't get taken out of school to be put to domestic duties or married off, and the young men see this as a better alternative to joining the militia.
Q: What's it like working with the UNHCR and the other NGO personnel on the ground?
RM: The UNHCR is responsible for almost everything in terms of actually delivering on the project. Since we don't have that kind of expertise, we are primarily the funder for this project, but a funder with a very clear idea of what we want to achieve. What we've helped facilitate is for the UNHCR, for the first time, to look at education on a multi-year basis. Historically they've had an annual budget and they used the funds the best way they could for that particular year. But they hadn't really thought about planning this on a more sustainable basis over the whole period of education.
KWB: The UNHCR is a very, very complex organization - not just at the head office in Geneva but when you get into Chad, you have the Chad desk, then you have the Field desk in Abeche, then you have the local office desk, and then there are implementation partners that actually deliver the activity on the ground. But the UNHCR manages to pull it all together; they're absolutely brilliant at delivering humanitarian aid.
RM: This is a very different level of engagement than what the UNHCR is used to. Typically with their other partnerships the corporate gives money and then goes away without a lot of follow-up. It's probably been a bit frustrating for them how much we want to be involved, understand what's going on and make suggestions. But I think they appreciate the value of our active participation and realize that if we are successful here we can develop a model for how the private sector can work with the UNHCR to educate refugee children around the world.
Q: What's next?
RM: The focus now is making sure that a good education level is established and delivered. And that the facilities we've built are used in the most efficient possible way. At the moment, schooling all occurs in the mornings because that's the cultural tradition. But that means that this wonderful infrastructure is actually empty in the afternoons. One of the things we're looking at now is finding enough teachers and students to change that practice so we can use the facilities in the afternoons as well. That way you'll have twice as many students go through. It seems obvious, but it's something that hadn't been thought about until we arrived and said hey, this doesn't make sense, why don't we try to do this a bit differently.
KWB: We also need to get the message out to all of our people at PwC who've been a part of this project that good things are happening, and they can be proud of what we are doing here. We are making a difference. Many of the women and the teachers and the community elders told us that they wouldn't be able to take their material belongings with them when they return to Sudan, but they would be able to return with a good education. Most of us tend to take our education for granted. But for refugees, education is absolutely pivotal to their future, for their survival now and their survival in the future when they get back to Sudan. They see their children as future leaders that will build a different Sudan than the one they fled from.
Q: What was the highlight of the trip for you?
KWB: When we were in the last camp there was a group of women and one woman was feeding her baby, and she gave me this funny, sideways look, and then asked me to take her baby back to Australia with me! Because there's a better life there she said, so take her, take her, take her. I can't tell the story without crying. I have a young daughter too, and I can't imagine how difficult life must be for you to actually want to give away your child so they can have a better life. I think of that often since I've been back.
RM: Perhaps coming away with a much better appreciation that the refugees in the camps are not just a generic group of unfortunate souls. They are people like you and me, who but for an accident of birth, our positions could be reversed just like that. That's a really sobering thought. They've got the same aspirations for their children as we have, and the young people have aspirations too just like we expect our children to have. They really feel the project makes a difference to what they're doing with their lives when they're in the camps. The schools have become a symbol of hope in the camp, a symbol of a better world. |
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