Hello! This is the Sunhak Peace Prize, a peace prize for future generations.👀👋
The Sunhak Peace Prize provides a ‘Learn and Act’ training package that educates middle school and above students on diverse global peace issues. The Learn and Act training program can be a learning ground for all global citizens to learn and act on global peace issues.
Teachers can lead the class in the form of presentations to students by referring to the teacher guide. Subsequently, students write a student activity sheet to arrange the class contents, and simultaneously, they can express their own ideas. Furthermore, detailed information based on statistical data from international organizations including the United Nations is provided.
The main purpose of the ‘Coexistence with Refugees’ class is to introduce students to the concept of refugees, their causes, and the seriousness of the refugee problem. It also encompasses the process of considering potential solutions to refugees through activities such as discussion and writing an activity sheet.
Do you want to learn in more detail about how to coexist with refugees?
First of all, the course is structured so that students can understand the situation refugees are confronted with by examining the reasons refugees have no choice but to leave their country and the history of refugees.
Refugees are people who have requested protection from UNHCR because they are forced to flee to another country to avoid diverse types of conflicts, disasters, and persecution that have occurred in their home country, or as they could not leave their unsafe country. The concept of a refugee may be confused with a migrant, but a refugee is a person who has no choice but to leave their country. The difference is that a migrant is a person who leaves their country with free will.
Why do they have no choice but to leave their home?
There are many reasons why refugees leave their homes. Most of them leave as a consequence of civil wars or wars between factions. Some have no choice but to leave their home due to differences in political ideology and religion. There also exist people who have lost their homes due to natural disasters such as floods, droughts, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
How many refugees are there in the world?
As of 2019, about 80 million people, or 1% of the world, are living as refugees. This number has doubled compared to 2010. If you include about 100 million people who have requested protection from other countries, the number of refugees is close to 200 million. These refugees are mainly from Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Venezuela, and they are currently suffering from extreme food and nutrient shortage.
What does the future hold for refugees who have fled their homes?
Multiple life-threatening risks remain during the process where refugees attempt to move from their homes to a safer place.
Refugees who attempt to risk their lives to escape are mainly destined for Europe. Those who arrive safely at refugee camps in Europe may apply for asylum. Yet, there are substantial cases where many countries put their own interests first and forcibly repatriate refugees.
The United Nations and diverse NGOs provide shelters or provide health care to refugees. After identification, they provide training opportunities or emergency relief. Most importantly, they are working with the political and social organizations of countries with high relevance to refugees, calling for changes in perceptions and laws so that there are no more refugees.
There are also individuals who are genuinely helping refugees. One example is Sakena Yacoobi, also called the mother of refugee education.
Sakena Yacoobi is a female educator from Afghanistan. While she was studying in the United States, she learned that wars in her country were creating refugees, and in 1995, she founded the Afghan Learning Institute, providing educational opportunities to approximately 14 million refugees. She has been educating more than 3,000 girls under the Taliban regime when it was banned to educate women.
These examples render students to consider specifically how they can act to address the serious refugee problem.
What should our attitude toward refugees be?
As global citizens, the refugee problem is not just a problem for refugee countries, but a problem for all of us. We must join forces with each organization as we are global citizens, and we must unite with each other to participate. Moreover, we must recognize that we are all potentially refugees. Based on such perception, we must strive to think about a way to coexist with refugees!
To realize this, we must continuously think about this problem from a young age. The Sunhak Peace Prize’s Learn and Act program refugee training does not instill the unilateral idea that refugees should or should not be accepted unconditionally. Please take time to consider the position of refugees as global citizens. In doing so, we provide opportunities for students to take time to comprehend them and explore potential solutions.
Thus far, we have introduced the refugee-themed training materials and refugee status prepared by ‘Learn & Act’. We hope it has been beneficial to those who craved to receive education concerning refugee issues.
These materials have been translated and provided in 7 languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Japanese as well as Korean. Further to the topic of global citizenship, we are providing training materials on diverse international issues, thus please continue to pay attention!
