FAS holds the "Universitats Refugi 2024" conference to improve refugee support strategy at the UAB

The meeting was attended by members of the UAB Governing Team, members of the Public Administration, members of the Board of Trustees and Advisory Council of the UAB Solidarity Foundation (FAS), technical teams and managers of refugee programmes from other universities, as well as other key actors of the UAB refugee welcome initiative.

Throughout the morning, attendants reflected on the role of universities in the face of the increase of forced displacements at a global level and, specifically, a working space was generated to provide tools and proposals for the process of review and improvement of the academic reception project at UAB.

The welcoming speech and presentation of the conference was given by Jordi Prat, director of FAS, who contextualised the strategies of refugee universities; members of the Welcome programme, who explained their experiences at the UAB; and Ahid Hakema, graduate of the UAB Master's Degree in Engineering and Science Modeling, who spoke about his story at the UAB Refugi.

Following that, the first part of the session, named "We activate changes, we build utopias" focused on the actors involved in offering academic refuge in Catalonia. The second part consisted of internal work among the participants of the UAB to begin shaping the proposal for improvement at university.

The conference also served to put on the table the proposals for the future that should be materialised in this area: organisational improvement and establishment of protocols in the UAB Refugee call, defense of the university refugee as a tool for inclusion and as an alternative to asylum, implementation of actions against the document limitation due to the refugee status and strengthening of programme resources and structure, among others.

This activity has been supported by the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation.