The Strengths Of RESPECT International
Since its inception in 2002, RESPECT International has accomplished numerous great achievements. Through the years, RESPECT has gathered a team of volunteers coordinators, editors, webmasters, teaching professionals, e-Zine writers, translators, all working together to increase awareness on refugee issues, build bridges between refugee and non-refugee communities, and encourage participating students to organise awareness raising events for their peers and fundraising events for their partner refugee schools.
Although RESPECT has met its goals, it still has to improve on a few aspects of its general activities. To evaluate the situation and work towards improvement, I was asked to collect the opinion of a RESPECT volunteer, former community leader and non-refugee teacher on RESPECT's strengths as an organisation.
Ashok Pillai, coordinator of RESPECT University, thinks that RESPECT has great assets which are based on having firm ideas, respect towards volunteers and refugees, giving volunteers the chance to use their field of expertise for a good cause and achieving its goals as well as setting up new ones.
Nestor Nyoma, former RESPECT coordinator for Cameroon, has a similar point of view to Ashok. Since last year Nestor has resettled in America but reported that while collaborating with RESPECT he could see that it had a strong ability to spread awareness among people regarding the refugee issues. He said it also could influence countries where refugee issues are not really known by promoting not only refugees' rights but also by showing people how to help them manage their problems.
Nestor had to flee his own country and was temporarily living in Cameroon while coordinating RESPECT's activities. He, therefore, benefited from RESPECT's activities as a refugee and also as a community leader before his resettlement.
When asked whether RESPECT should change some of its operations, he replied: "I just wish that more institutions would do what RESPECT does, meaning make the world understand the difficult situations that refugees have to live in, and at the same way touch people's heart."
Nestor sincerely thinks that RESPECT is a strong organisation whose actions are not limited to speeches but which also improves the refugees' conditions of life in a specific way.
Isha Miranda, a RESPECT University teacher, took the opportunity to also make some suggestions regarding RESPECT University program. She reckons that RESPECT should ask its teaching professionals to design permanent courses with room for updates and adaptation for individual countries. She believes that the teachers need to identify the needs of internally displaces persons (IDPs) and determine their environment prior to the start of any courses.
This will tremendously improve the program and help address possible problems beforehand. She also added that she firmly believes that RESPECT will grow to become an important educational organisation in a near future.
Amongst the three interviewed, Ashok was the only one to talk about RESPECT's weaknesses, which for him deal mainly with RESPECT's global letter exchange and University program. He thinks that the scarcity of funds to set up projects and the lack of infrastructure to enable refugee students to take part in RESPECT University are too often jeopardizing ongoing projects, causing them to suddenly come to a stand still with no other way to keep the process going.
These problems should, according to him, be addressed soon as part of RESPECT's activities improvement.
Isha and Ashok will be happy to know that RESPECT has already addressed the problems they highlighted. In fact, it has applied for charitable status which will make fundraising and soliciting donations easier. It has sponsored computer centres so that students can benefit from RESPECT University courses. It is working on converting the course information and assignments from successful courses into web pages, to provide an on-line resource bank of learning materials to refugees.