In May, 21-year-old Kashif Kazmi fled his hometown of Parachinar in northwest Pakistan. As part of the country's Shiite minority, Kazmi was targeted by the Pakistani Taliban. The rest of his family are still there.
Kazmi wants to give his sisters a better life. He hopes one day to bring them to Germany. For him, this means pursuing higher education, something he says he was denied back home: "They don't want us to be educated. They want us to be ignorant."
Kazmi arrived in Berlin at the end of July and is already
speaking some German. Having traveled through nine countries to get here, he
has overcome many barriers. But as an asylum-seeker, he is not permitted to
attend a local university because he doesn't have the requisite paperwork and
status.
Markus Kressler pulls up a virtual seminar on mechanical
engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, on his laptop. The
25-year-old is a co-founder of Kiron University, a Berlin-based program for
refugees that taps into open-source online lectures from other universities.
Kiron University students take courses online for the first
two years, working toward a bachelor's degree while they apply for asylum and
acquire the paperwork and qualifications needed to enter a partner university,
local to where they are, to complete the degree."Basically, everyone can
already log into these courses," Kressler says. "What we do is we
just take these courses, bundle them into degree programs and make cooperation
with real universities so that they also recognize these courses in order to
really get a degree in the end."
Partner Universities
Kressler says Kiron is already partnering with 30
universities throughout Europe and in Africa, and currently is in talks with
U.S. Ivy League institutions. He says the partnership is attractive to
established universities."Every kind of university has about 30 to 50
percent free seats in the third year because so many students quit," he
says. In Europe, it's customary to earn a bachelor's in three years. Kiron
students simply fill these empty seats.The program may also benefit the German
economy. Currently, Kiron offers degrees in fields including computer science,
engineering, business and architecture — all areas in which there is a skills
shortage in the German labor market.
The university is starting its pilot semester this month
with 1,000 students. The interest is far greater, but Kiron requires
investment."As a start-up, you always need to create the proof of concept
to show everyone that it really works," Kressler says. "If you start
an online university for refugees, it takes three or four years in order to see
if the students can actually go into the job market."
Kiron University says each student will cost it $400 a year,
which it hopes to finance with crowdfunding and sponsorship.Kazmi is among the
first group of students starting at Kiron this week. He's excited, he says,
"because Nelson Mandela [said] that education is the real weapon to change
the world. So I believe in education, because it's a journey from darkness into
light."
He has signed up for a degree in business. It's not science,
his first love.
"It's my zeal and zest," he says of science. But
for now, Kiron doesn't offer science degrees. Kazmi does find inspiration in
his heroes Isaac Newton, who survived the English Civil War and narrowly
escaped the Great Plague, and Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi Germany.
But he's pragmatic and says the business course will give
him the skills to help others.
He'd like to work in humanitarian aid. "Today I am a
refugee," Kazmi says, "but tomorrow, I hope so, I will be in the
position to be able to support others."
