According to one estimate, the global refugee population has more than doubled over the past decade to 26 million. Professor Keith Watenpaugh, director of the Human Rights Studies program at UC Davis, leads an innovative project to help refugee students start or continue their university education â even as they are displaced and on the move.
In this monthâs episode of The Backdrop, a UC Davis podcast, Watenpaugh discussed the Article 26 Backpack project, the UC Davisâ Human Rights Studies program and his rethinking of the history of humanitarianism.
âPeople donât just need blankets and food, they need to have their rights protected. Their rights to education, their rights to political citizenship, and balancing the provision of assistance with providing this critical rights-based assistance is one of the things that humanitarianism has utterly failed in and continues to fail in todayâ said Watenpaugh.
âThe Article 26 Backpack is a way for refugees and other displaced people to effectively curate, store, and share across international boundaries or locally their critical academic documentation. This is really important because most refugees donât have good access to higher education and we know that higher education is one of the most effective means for people to make the transition to new societies, but also to ready themselves to go home to societies and help rebuild them. One of the most critical problems with refugees is that theyâre often missing important educational documents.â
Watenpaugh also mentioned the current success of the backpack. âWhat we do see is young people using backpack in seeking scholarships; theyâre downloading documents and attaching them to their applications. The other measures of success are how many organizations are reaching out to us to invite us to use it for the people theyâre working with.â
The Backdrop podcast is a monthly interview program featuring conversations with UC Davis scholars and researchers working in the social sciences, humanities, arts and culture. It is available free, on demand at , , , , and . The Backdrop is hosted by public radio veteran Soterios Johnson.
Listen to the podcast episode . Visit the Article 26 Backpack website