CLCC’s 2021 Yearbook captures a year of learnings and partnership in refugee higher education.
Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Education Movement (SNHU GEM) envisions a world where higher education meets all students – including refugees – where they are. Achieving this vision requires commitment and participation from many organizations and higher learning institutions around the world. As a member of the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium (CLCC), SNHU GEM can share the knowledge, experience, and evidence gained from our program with other refugee educators across the globe.
The CLCC aims to promote, coordinate, and support quality higher education in contexts of conflict, crisis and displacement. The CLCC is comprised of 33 member organizations, including SNHU GEM partners like Jesuit Refugee Services in Kenya, the Lebanese Association For Scientific Research, Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, and Kepler University.
Each year, the CLCC produces a digital yearbook full of stories, case studies, and testimonials from its member organizations. The newly-published Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium 2021 Yearbook highlights the remarkable accomplishments of SNHU GEM students in 2021, including statistics that reveal:
- 98% of SNHU GEM graduates complete their degrees in four years or less.
- 95% of all SNHU GEM students complete an internship prior to graduation.
- Six months after graduation, 88% of GEM alumni are employed.
- To date, more than 1,800 students have participated in this unique, life-changing program.
The 2021 Yearbook also shares testimonials from SNHU GEM students, including Mary Nyaluak, the first SNHU GEM graduate in Nairobi, Kenya who now owns her own business, and Alnarjes Harba, an SNHU GEM Lebanon graduate pursuing her dream to attend medical school. Alnarjes explains, “SNHU GEM was never just a program. It is a way to see the world from a different perspective and help overcome war and displacement.”
As the Yearbook points out, the global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has “presented a moment to reconsider the nature of higher education and how it might adapt to meet the needs of emerging opportunities in the labor market. This is particularly relevant as climate events intensify in both scale and frequency, increasing the numbers of people forced to flee and time spent displaced.”
SNHU GEM believes that while talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not, so we are proud to support the collective and participate in a community seeking to expand access to high-quality education in the most difficult contexts.
