Welcome
Empowering refugees through education and intergration
Mary Gina Angaun helps poor farmers and vulnerable communities in North-Eastern Uganda. In Germany she studies the integration of refugees.
During her work in Karamoja, the savannah in northeast Uganda, Mary Gina Angaun usually drives a motorcycle from village to village over sandy slopes. Today in Berlin, however, she navigates her team members through the IRC-global RescueNet website with quick clicks of the mouse. “And here we are,” she says, pointing to a subchapter called “Economic Recovery”; the projector throws a list of a dozen projects on the wall. “This is my department. We do all of this in Karamoja.”
One organisation, different tasks
Mary Gina Angaun, 29, has the same employer as the people in the room: The International Rescue Committee (IRC); a global aid organisation for refugees and war victims. But while her colleagues from IRC Germany are involved in projects such as protecting refugees against violence in German reception centres or accompanying international aid projects, she is providing continued education on economic empowerment and gender based violence prevention in one of Uganda’s poorest regions.
Today Mary Gina Angaun explains her work in Uganda to the eleven employees of the IRC Berlin office. She has been a scholarship holder for almost three months in ifa’s CrossCulture Programme Refugees and Migration which serves to exchange good practice across national borders and which aims to create and promote an international network of institutions and persons.
“It’s about empowerment,” Mary Gina Angaun summarises her talk. “We encourage farmers, small business people, and pastoralists with emphasis on women to start village banks with the objective to provide economic security and to plan investments together.” In addition, the staffs of IRC have more effective methods of agriculture besides livestock farming, which still dominates the region.
Knowing more about the own organisation
Mary Gina Angaun studied social work and is an all-rounder when it comes to working with communities in different contexts, advising villagers on finance, agriculture and education, as well as successful household initiatives such as joint decision making, joint asset acquisition or accumulation and access and ownership.
“I am impressed by the systematic way refugees are offered vocational training and continued education.” Back in Uganda she will take new knowledge about dual education, strong network systems and the buddy principle found in empowering institutions or partner organisations of IRC in Germany, where young refugees receive personal, weekly coaching and mentorships. “This is also a kind of therapy for these people.”
Germany could also learn a lot from Uganda, a small, economically unstable country with a refugee population of more than one million people. “One of the refugees in Berlin told me that she sometimes feels uncomfortable here in Germany, like a beggar,” she says. The bureaucratic procedures in Germany sometimes take a long time. The Germans could become more aware that a good reception of refugees including education benefits everyone in the long term.
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