Youth Education and Sports

Refugee-Led Conference on Research that Amplifies Refugee Voices in Connected Learning Higher Education Programs. Updates: We’re thrilled to share the latest on the COHERE CLCC Project, an inspiring effort to empower student researchers while upholding ethical academic excellence. Following our recent updates, a wide range of activities have been going on including completion of the training for refugee student researchers, research proposals review, and consultations on successful student support. After our meeting on January 26, 2025, at Cairo Hotel, and recent strides in student support, here’s the scoop on our progress! The meeting brought together project coordinators, finance team members, and reviewers to review milestones. We discussed student proposals currently under review, prioritizing ethical data collection. To equip our students, we’ve held two workshop days on SPSS and quantitative data analysis, alongside peer-to-peer sessions at the Learning Center. Students are now paired with mentors—drawn from our skilled reviewer pool—for personalized guidance via virtual meetings, helping their proposals take shape. On the ethical front, following our research team’s advice, the project turned out to be large, and for authenticity matters and with the strong commitment to YES mission, certain principles and guidelines need to be followed. We’re advancing a partnership with Musinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST) through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to review undergraduate proposals. The MOU is being finalized, and a budget-friendly option was endorsed by our finance team. Excitingly, the updated reviewer guidelines have now been shared with reviewers, along with assigned student proposals, to ensure consistent and constructive feedback. However, to be able to align with the review team and ensure flexibility for our students’ diverse projects, we are envisaging further assessment of the timeline. Our student researchers are off to a strong start! Proposals are in review, with three groups already receiving initial feedback via email from project coordinators. Students are tapped into Learning Center resources since earlier February, including gadgets supplied by the academic team. After this first feedback round, mentors will guide students to finalize and approve their work.