SAFE is a three-year project aiming at fostering the collaboration between stakeholders at a transnational level in order to develop and improve access to protection through private sponsorship schemes and complementary pathways, such as humanitarian corridors, family reunification and student mobility for beneficiaries of international protection.
Funded by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), it is coordinated by Forum réfugiés-Cosi (FR-C) and gathers the following partners: Federation of Protestant Mutual Aid (FEP), French Red Cross (CRF), Italian Red Cross (CRI), Italian Federation of Protestant Churches (FCEI), Mediterranean Universities Union (UNIMED) and Oxfam Italy.
Within this project, operational information and support desks are established in 3 UNIMED associated universities, namely University of Setif 2 (Algeria), Duhok University (Iraq/KRG), and University of Cagliari (Italy) and at UNHCR Morocco. The purpose is to facilitate the access of 3 young refugee student, one per each sending university, to a Master’s Degree (2 years) at the University of Cagliari. Therefore, those support desks design and implement University corridors in the form of Complementary Pathways for the benefit of 3 young refugees.
In the previous years (2017-2019) UNIMED has coordinated the RESCUE project (Refugees Education Support in mena Countries) funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the EU under the “Capacity Building for Higher Education” sub programme. The objective of the RESCUE project was to support 8 Universities in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq/Krg in facilitating the access of refugee and other disadvantaged students to the local Higher Education system: this objective was pussued by setting up the so called Refugee Student Operational Support Units (R-SOS Units), which have become operational in 2019 and most of them are still functioning in 2022.
Hence the goal of this Platform is to facilitate the exchange of training resources, experience, knowledge and opportunties for coopertaion between the SAFE desk Offices and the existing R-SOS units