With the support of the International Islamic Charity Organization, the Arakan Humanitarian Association continues the “Nojoum” Project to sponsor distinguished Rohingya students in Turkish universities, with the aim of developing their capabilities and qualifying them to be, after their graduation, leaders capable of having a positive and developmental impact on their society.
During the academic year 2023/2024, the project included paying tuition fees for distinguished Rohingya students, providing them with academic and educational consultations to help them achieve psychological balance, in addition to establishing a leadership qualification program that includes training, educational, and entertainment segments that enhance their intellectual, emotional, and behavioral aspects, develop their skills, and give them confidence needed as promising leaders.
Furthermore, the project aims to direct and develop the students’ energies and skills and provide them with skills in the moral, intellectual and leadership aspects, in addition to enhancing the value of volunteering and giving in them and encouraging them to participate in various volunteer activities. As well as helping them choose positive role models that will constitute inspiring models for them to follow.
The Rohingya student undergoes an intensive leadership qualification program, which includes various training courses, such as participation in international conferences and events, meetings with famous and influential figures, educational and awareness lectures, voluntary work, theatrical activities, cultural competitions, and recreational activities and trips.
Accompanying Activities
The accompanying activities programs varied between many fruitful courses and training programs, under the titles: Self-purification, Embodying role models, Inspiring a shared vision, Challenging processes, Empowering others, Encouraging the heart, Individual coaching sessions for students, Taking the LPI scale, Doctrinal doubts, Thinking Systems and cognitive biases. As well as the impact of values and beliefs on individual behavior, conducting the DISC scale by students, knowing yourself and understanding others, designing advertising campaigns from the perspective of crowd psychology.
Moreover, the activities also addressed how to prepare graduation assignments in light of the Leadership Challenge Program (vision, values matrix, leadership project), critical thinking, and how do we embody values in our lives? Cognitive testing and leadership project presentations.
The IICO Vision
The project stems from the IICO strategic vision 2022-2026, which seeks, within one of its focus areas, to build the human being culturally and educationally by providing educational and rehabilitative opportunities with qualitative outcomes through three paths:
First: Supporting the creation and design of qualitative educational curricula, aiming to support and empower educational institutions and initiatives in order to build the learner’s personality, develop ideas, knowledge, awareness, and develop skills, which is what is desired through the project to address learning difficulties in the curricula of Syrian refugees.
Second: Supporting qualification programs to provide teachers with the cognitive, professional, and technical skills and competencies necessary to improve educational outcomes and formulate an attractive educational environment for learners. One of the initiatives that has proven successful in this regard is the Teacher Training in Emergency Situations Project, which the IICO launched in partnership with many academic institutions.
Third: Providing programs and scholarships that meet needs, develop capabilities, develop school curricula according to the needs of labor markets, and establish sustainable educational institutions in fragile areas.
Challenges and Problems
Depriving the Rohingya of education is one of the arbitrary practices practiced against them with the aim of continuing their weakness and exacerbating their suffering. One of the results of this is the absence of the intellectual and academic elite among them, who bear the responsibility of leading the Rohingya community, seeking its interests, and taking it towards a safer and more stable future.
According to the project’s study, the Rohingya Muslims lack the presence of a single legal academic or politician among their children to defend them and adopt their cause, and there are only 50 doctors among them, while the minimum number of their doctors must not be less than 5 thousand doctors, given that their number is nearly four million individuals.
The project’s students believe that the tragic reality of the Rohingyas will not change unless an elite group of their children is armed with science and knowledge and possesses a level of leadership qualification that makes them capable of accelerating the process of the Rohingyas’ entry into the renaissance civilizational cycle.
Psychologically, members of the Rohingya minority suffer from constant anxiety, helplessness, and frustration due to their lack of stability in their livelihood and their continued state of permanent unemployment for many years, in addition to the psychological trauma they have suffered due to their exposure to torture and persecution, the loss of their relatives, the loss of hope in improving their conditions and obtaining a favorable opportunity for a decent life, the uncertainty of their future and their inability to determine their own destiny.
Confronting their psychological suffering requires working to establish living stability, training them in some simple manual occupations, containing and rehabilitating them psychologically, treating them from the effects of previous psychological traumas, and instilling in them a spirit of hope and optimism for a better future, whatever the circumstances.
One of the manifestations of students’ moral suffering is family disintegration, moral decline, and behavioral deviations, due to the difficulty of living within the normal family framework, or due to the family fragmentation that members of the same family suffer from. They are distributed among several countries and camps, and the value priority has declined in favor of the priority of survival in any form, and the weakness or disintegration of the educational and social system, which is getting worse over the days.
To morally confront the suffering of the Rohingya, it is necessary to intensify Sharia lessons, spread Islamic culture, encourage family communication, and provide ways to instilling good morals through the establishment of educational programs and cultural competitions.
Furthermore, one of the features of the social suffering of the Rohingya is the loss of identity and its disruption largely due to living in temporary shelters, which do not allow for normal cultural development, and orphanhood and widowhood due to the presence of large numbers of orphans and widows living without a breadwinner who is responsible for them. In addition to the difficulties of marriage, whether for a young man or a girl in light of the weak capabilities available.
The Rohingya Muslim minority lives in the Rakhine region, which was known as Arakan in Myanmar, before it was subjected to persecution and discrimination. The United Nations classified it in one of its reports as “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
